Reducing Stock Shrinkage
All of your information is housed in a POS system. Everything from stock quantity, to prices and reports, can be accessed through a cloud-based POS. While that kind of help with managing your business is a major benefit to using a mobile system, being so accessible can also be dangerous.
A very real problem for every retail business is shrinkage. Inventory shrinkage comes as the result of many things — from internal and external theft, to inaccurate stock counts and supplier fraud. All of these potential issues can greatly impact your business’s bottom line, but the good news is that most of them can be reduced or improved upon with the right processes in place and the right software in your store.
Here are three features that your POS should have to help reduce shrinkage in your shop.
Restrict employee permissions and external logins
Employees at different levels should be able to access different information. Don’t give all employees the ability to create products or add product discounts, log in from outside of the store or void a sale. Whether an employee is trying to steal from your business, or is simply unfamiliar with proper procedures, they could potentially remove items out of your inventory, alter the earnings for the day or discount an item for a customer beyond what you would allow. Any of these actions could misrepresent your inventory, making you entirely unaware that you’re losing stock.
Monitor employee activity closely
Knowing what your employees are doing with your merchandise is important. Make sure to check reports on which employees are discounting and by how much — this is a surefire way to spot potential issues before they compound and cause you a real problem. How much are your employees discounting? Are inventory levels being altered in any way? Regardless of the permissions you’ve granted your employees, a full inventory change log is incredibly useful when it comes to being up-to-date on what’s happening behind the scenes.
Count inventory carefully
There’s that special time of year when you close shop and count all inventory armed with an iPad and your scanner. Going through your store and ensuring that all stock is properly counted and registered is absolutely critical — it’s these numbers that will serve as the basis for all stock counts throughout the year. Once the count is done, you can generate a report that will allow for you to compare against your previous records. What is the difference between what you had expected to see and what is in front of you? Which items are the most problematic? What kind of financial discrepancy are you finding? These numbers will be a great marker and may highlight some key oversights in the way you manage your stock.
Inventory shrinkage is a major issue for retailers. Although some stock loss is unavoidable, there are many things that store owners can do to reduce the amount of loss their business incurs. From managing employee access to monitoring reports, these are a few important ways that your POS system could help you prevent stock loss in your business.
This article is provided by our partner Lightspeed. Read more articles from Lightspeed on their blog at: https://www.lightspeedhq.com/blog/
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