While we all love the excitement of giving gifts during the holiday season, there are some employees that feel they will pick out their own gift and take from you. This present isn’t in the form of a beautifully wrapped gift with a large red bow; instead it is the present that leaves your register or bottom line lighter. There are several ways to use the Aspect EliteLP application to help you identify those employees that might be taking advantage of you.
Employees may find it easier to ring a fraudulent or heavily discounted purchase on their own rather than trying to recruit a friend to do their dirty work. You can run a basic report that will show you any time the employee ringing the purchase was also the employee making the purchase. Even if they are not fraudulent, these transactions are usually against company policy and should be reviewed to ensure they are valid transactions.
As I mentioned in this blog previously when talking about SVC’s or Gift Cards, it is often easier for employees to steal the cards than actual cash from the register. We have already discussed employees taking advantage of left behind gift cards in our Walking in a Gift Card Wonderland blog, but employees have figured out even more ways to use SVC’s to their discount abusing advantage. It is important to run reports that are looking at SVC’s Issued and Redeemed by the Same Person. This will identify instances where the associate ringing the purchase or return later uses the SVC in an employee purchase. If you see transaction where this is the case, it will be helpful to review both the issuing and redeeming transactions. Employees may be making fraudulent returns without receipts and then will use the SVC on their purchases later. Employees also may be using SVC’s that were used in customer transactions but then were left behind. Looking at Employee Purchases with SVC Redeemed queries and then checking SVC’s in which previous purchases were not employee purchases will help you to locate instances where this may be occurring. You can also find these transactions by looking at Multiple SVC Redemptions Same Account, Date.
By running the Employee Merchandise Credit Transactions Report you can use this report to track employees using merchandise credits on employee discount purchases/refunds, especially if this is against corporate policy. Other problems revealed by this report might be use of the same merchandise credit account number against the same employee number, or merchandise credit refunds not involving employee discounts (employees ringing refunds without returning their discount).
Employee Purchase with Repetitive Amounts is a great report to keep an eye on. Use this report to investigate associates with frequent employee transactions rung for the same amounts. The report lists associates who have rung multiple employee purchases (or refunds) for the same amount. The report shows the associate, the amount of the repetitive transaction, and the count. Keep in mind that this report is by the associate who rang the sale, not the purchaser. You can track the purchasing employee with any of the Top Employee Purchases report. The Employee may be purchasing a hot item for friend or reselling on eBay or Craig’s List for a profit.
Another useful report to run is Top Employee Purchases. Sort this report by Discount Amount to see those employees which stand out above the norm. Also, it may be helpful to identify employees that have not ever used their employee discount. The holiday season is the perfect opportunity to take advantage of this employee benefit and employees that are not making any purchases may be taking advantage of you in some other dishonest way. It is also something to watch when you see employees with low employee purchases but witness them wearing or using a lot of new company product. These employees may be taking this merchandise if it does not seem to match up with the employee purchases you can track in Aspect.
Employees may also try to take advantage of store promotions and additional savings. It is important to make sure that you are watching for stacked discounts in employee transactions. These could be training issues if employees are unaware of store policies regarding employee discounts but many times these are ways they are trying to take advantage of what they perceive as loopholes. This is also important when discussing the purchase of SVC cards. You will want to ensure that employees know the policies regarding the use of their employee discounts to purchase and/or redeem SVC’s because this is the busiest time of the year for these transactions.
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