Covid was terrible on retail. Hopefully, we continue to recover, but the fallout remains, and this fallout is particularly tough when it comes to employee recruitment and retention. A number of factors have converged to result in an environment where employees are leaving the retail profession in droves, and replacements are difficult to attract in a competitive labor market. A good Cash Management System will not solve this problem, but it can help. Here’s why.
Money is Dirty
We all know that money has a lot of dirt on it. That dirt plays havoc with CMS hardware, which is why it needs to be serviced regularly. It also means some employees are sensitive to the idea of having to touch cash. Covid has heightened this sensitivity – and for good reason. Make it a point to tell potential employees that you care about their health, and your CMS is one place you can point to as evidence of that.
Eliminate Tedious and Repetitive Tasks
Counting a thousand dollars may not seem like a big deal, but try doing it two or three times a day – and never make a mistake. That’s what you’re doing to your employees if you don’t have a CMS in place. Cash management is a tedious and repetitive affair when you rely on people power to do the counting, the sorting, and the transportation to a financial institution, not to mention the back office tasks related to reconciling your cash position with your POS.
Employees hate doing this type of work, and you can’t blame them. It’s boring, and yet if they make a mistake they could be in serious trouble. A CMS eliminates this issue completely by automating virtually the entire process: skimming the till, beginning and end-of-day cash operations, cash sorting, cash counting, counterfeit checks, and organizing cash for pickup. A CMS also provides all the reports needed to reconcile with the POS system quickly and easily – not to mention providing data that will help you optimize your cash management.
Money in the Store is Stressful
Beyond the operational efficiencies to be gained by using a CMS, consider the fact that having cash around is very stressful for everyone who works in a store. It doesn’t matter if you’re a cashier, a manager, or someone in the back. Cash is there, and that means if any of it is missing, people will be questioned. That stress reaches its maximum when security personnel come in to transport it to a financial institution, and it goes sky high if an employee is responsible for the cash run.
As well, cash makes the store a target for robbery.
There’s a simple solution. A CMS secures the cash, creates a complete audit trail for every banknote you earn, and gives head office control over user permissions and access to the cash. The CMS takes the stress away because the cash has been counted and secured in a safe. There are no questions to be answered anymore, no more counting mistakes – and the robbery threat is eliminated.
End the Awkward POS Reconciliation Talks
You’ve wasted an hour going over the records and you’re five dollars short. So you have to talk to the cashier on duty at the time and ask. They invariably say they put all the money in the safe – but it’s a dumb safe, nothing but an empty space with a combination. You don’t have a CMS, which tells you exactly when a deposit was made, who made it, and if any money was taken out. The employee takes your question as an accusation and storms out.
It's only the next day you learn another manager took out five dollars for petty cash!
Avoid the problem altogether by having a CMS in place that provides the information you need to deal with any cash shortfalls.
Create a Sense of Pride in Operations
This last point is more general. Today’s younger employees expect to work in a modern, efficient environment, and they particularly like to work with technology and software. Sure, you can train them to do things manually, but they won’t like it. A next-generation CMS ticks all the boxes – speeds everything up, gets rid of boring tasks, removes the stress from having unsecured cash in the store – and they’ll think it’s cool to see that the cash management process has been automated.
Again, a CMS won’t solve all your store operation challenges – but it sure will help – and employees will love you for it.