Till Discrepancies - How much is too much?

Jonny303

Morning all,

I have a shop/petrol station handling approximately 700 transactions a day (not a huge amount).

My tills never seem to balance. 20% of the time they will be within €1, 60% of the time they will be within €10 and the rest would be over.

In the main the tills are down, but can also be up.

I've looked for paterns with staff but can't see any. Unfortunately we work off a single till so its hard to be exact with this.

Anyone in this area of retail? What would the standard be? I know it should be close to 0, but is that realistic?

Seth Brundle

Does the till display the change due to the customer?

Victor

From a manager's point of view, the till being down slightly is preferable (customers are more likely to notice being down), once it is within 1% of cash sales (debit / credit card sales should be bang on). Be careful of cashiers that are bang on a disproportionate percentage of days.

Only let one person use any particular float. Change floats when you change cashier.

Have some procedure to deal with tips / people overpaying.

What do staff contracts say about cash shortages?

Do staff keep their tills tidy?

Install cameras over the till, looking at the cash drawer.

tracey turnblad

I worked for a large supermarket and we would have big cash discrepancies. Anything over €10 was noted and anything over €30 would be questioned. Cashiers were never expected to make up the difference. Can you do till checks between cashiers or limit the use if two are on at the same time one works on the floor and one and only one controls the till. That way it is seen by the staff tight controls are in place and they are responsible for short and overs. Also draw up a shorts and over policy and a limit at which your staff will be questioned and disciplined. Other wise if there is no consequences they'll be less likely to be as careful

Bandara

We 'allow' €1 per €5000

Obviously it is also subject to pattern being checked etc.

Keep a recorded short/over for each month and tally at month end, that's the real figure you want.

You are stocktaking cigs weekly?, and scratch cards, lotto, billpay, utility sales, bus tickets/toll bridge/bin tags/ phone credits daily ?

And your coin safe daily as well ?

Cocobongo

Jonny303 wrote: »

Morning all,

I have a shop/petrol station handling approximately 700 transactions a day (not a huge amount).

My tills never seem to balance. 20% of the time they will be within €1, 60% of the time they will be within €10 and the rest would be over.

In the main the tills are down, but can also be up.

I've looked for paterns with staff but can't see any. Unfortunately we work off a single till so its hard to be exact with this.

Anyone in this area of retail? What would the standard be? I know it should be close to 0, but is that realistic?

It depends what's normal or not for you

I'd never take this, or especially any discrepancy bigger than 5eur

The could only be two things - manager leaving the wrong float or staff not giving the correct change (or, if worst comes to worse - stealing)

jimmii

If it's out by €10 20% of the time that would be concerning even if it's just about the accuracy of the work your staff are doing.

antoinolachtnai

Add up three months or so of overs/unders. (If you don't have them in a spreadsheet, get them into a spreadsheet.)

It would come in pretty close to zero if we are just talking about it just being mistakes. Do this exercise to make sure you actually know where you stand.

As I am sure you are aware, any 'over' is part of the revenue of the business and has to be accounted for.

You do have to look out for overs as well as unders. If there is an 'over' for example it could be because someone is storing money for something they stole (by under-ringing) in the till and getting caught out trying to balance things off.

If your 'under' really is as high as you believe it is, then the problem is what you are going to do about it.

I would suggest that you balance the till/change the cash drawer an extra time a day (twice if you currently balance it once, three times if you currently balance it twice). Always do it at a regular time of the day.

The other thing you can do is give some training on the correct way to handle cash. You really want to move to a situation where there is only one acceptable procedure by which change is given and the till is balanced. There are two reasons to do this; one is to make the most important reason is to easier to deal with disputes with customers over change; the second reason is to make sure you get all the money due.

The main thing is to send the signal to everybody that (a) it is important that the company collects all its revenue and (b) that cash operations are being scrutinised.

In this day and age, CCTV is a reality of cash handling but it might not actually be worth your while at your scale and if it is a small, personal sort of place.

M.T.D

Long long time ago I worked as trainee/assistant manager in a shop, as there actually was no on site manager I managed the shop but on trainee wages.
This was in the days before bar codes, tills that told you the change, etc. Procedure was, look at price on product, ring in to till, put money in tray, calculate and give change to the customer, transfer money into till.
The till was expected to balance every day, never a word of percentage errors, allowance for mistakes etc. Rule was that no staff that had used the till were to leave the premises until the till was balanced. Rarely were there any discrepancies between the cash and the till roll total. If there was, by going through the till roll items, we would almost always find the mistake, usually transposed digit i.e 4.59 rather than 4.95. BTW always gives an error divisible by 9. We would then highlight the error for accounts. Unexplained errors got a lot of earache, and sometimes a visit, from head office so a balanced till was important.

SDKev

We've a €5 allowance. Anything over/under that has to be investigated.

From my own experience, till counts that are over the ZRead are far more of a concern than tills that are under.

We have a blind count policy, so stores count the money and enter the values before they actually know how much money should be in the till.

We've 40 tills over 10+ locations.

L.Jenkins

A few thoughts on the issue:

• I'd start with cameras first, watching over tills and staff. (I know of one case previous case, in which a relative of a retailer was taking €5/€10 2 or 3 times a week. I reviewed the footage myself)
• If you don't have computerised tills, you should try and get your hands on some. May help to reduce error, while providing detailed sales reports.
• Implement strict policies. Ensure staff don't share tills. Note the float each member leaves with, what they return with and compare against receipts. Computerised reports and cameras should help prevent any complex trickery that may allow staff to steal.

Just a couple of thoughts, which are open to being ripped apart. My initial thought upon reading the original post, someone may just be stealing. No way would a till be off by that much, week on week unless staff were utterly negligent at the same time.

Bandara

Bandara wrote: »

You are stocktaking cigs weekly?, and scratch cards, lotto, billpay, utility sales, bus tickets/toll bridge/bin tags/ phone credits daily ?

And your coin safe daily as well ?

I quote my own earlier post.

This is the most important thing you can be doing. If someone has graduated to taking hard cash then you can be 100% sure they started with the above first.

Which means you don't just have a cash problem, you have a stock problem also.

Are you fully on top of stock control for the items I listed ?

jacksn

I always find it weird that i never get a receipt at any petrol station without having to ask for one then its a big tut and sigh from the cashier to give me one. Is it to save till roll?

Gloomtastic!

jacksn wrote: »

I always find it weird that i never get a receipt at any petrol station without having to ask for one then its a big tut and sigh from the cashier to give me one. Is it to save till roll?

If anyone tutted to me from behind a counter for asking for a receipt, they would receive a short, sharp lashing from my tongue. I don't believe it's ever happened though......

Seth Brundle

Gloomtastic! wrote: »

If anyone tutted to me from behind a counter for asking for a receipt, they would receive a short, sharp lashing from my tongue. I don't believe it's ever happened though......

If someone tuts at you they presumably don't care what you have to say!

jacksn

Gloomtastic! wrote: »

If anyone tutted to me from behind a counter for asking for a receipt, they would receive a short, sharp lashing from my tongue. I don't believe it's ever happened though......

maybe just me, last few times its happened, different stations but 9 out 10 times i never get a receipt automatically