Even More Tools of the Trade

As a continuation of our last discussion on the many additional tools available to help you focus your investigation, I want to look at Transaction Analysis, Incident Analysis and Trending Reports.  All of this can be found under the Tools Menu.

Transaction Analysis: Many of you may be familiar with using transaction analysis from detail reports by clicking the right mouse button and selecting from a transaction detail popup menu.  However, the Tools menu provides the second use of this function. Access from the Tools menu allows you to use Transaction Analysis for ad hoc investigations of transaction detail. Transaction Analysis is a dual-purpose investigative tool that provides the investigator with the complete transaction record of a register or associate for a sales date. Users have found this analysis helpful when looking at trends of cashier dishonesty or searching for additional supporting evidence. 

Incident Analysis: The Incident Analysis tool allows you to obtain high-level summary information by store.  Information from Incident Analysis is often used to create benchmarks of “normal” store activity.  Meaningful sub reports and filters can then be created from these benchmarks.  This allows you to be able to more easily identify those that are outside of “normal” store activity. You can also create Incident Analysis Queries that you can save for future use.

Trending: Do you want to determine if a suspected dishonest associate’s patterns change over time when compared to others in the same group?  How about determine if activity changes when a suspected associate is out of the store on vacation?  The Trending tool gives you the ability to see how selected reporting elements change over periods of time.  Trending can be done on a Regional, District, Store or Associate Level.  Your Aspect Administrator can set custom trending periods to meet the specific needs of your company.  This also allows you to track information over selected periods of time and to compare key percentages between stores.  You will be able to find some additional tips on our LinkedIn page about how to build the trending reports if you have questions.

In my next entry I will look at using the Store Profile to enhance your analysis.  We are hoping that all of these tips are helping you to go above and beyond the basic functions of your Aspect EliteLP application.  The more evidence you can provide, the greater the reward when you are able to conduct your interview.  These tips/tools can help add all those important pieces to the internal theft puzzle your associates have created.