Restaurant servers and bartenders don’t like dealing with monetary bills, dispensing change, doing quick math in their heads, right? Wrong. If a restaurant guest orders two beers with cash in hand, a server or bartender can quickly determine the price, take their payment, give them change out of their tip jar, and keep the difference. If your restaurant servers are doing this, over time it could lead to a severe loss of revenue for your establishment. See how the power of restaurant sales software can ensure that you never see another dime walk out your door without you knowing about it again.
- Know your authorizing employees. Restaurant operators love seeing their managers in the trenches, interacting with guests, handling food issues, maintaining a consistent flow in the restaurant. A great way to see the impact a manager has on a particular day of business is to run a promotion or void report and sort by authorizing employee. If you notice that a particular manager who works an equal number of shifts compared to the rest of the team has a much higher monetary value in either one of these categories, it may be a red flag. Is this manager unnecessarily comping items for friends? Are they voiding off items that were paid for with cash? A server could be using a manager’s login, or even a manager could be stealing from you.
- Watch the error corrects. If you’re an authorizing manager and you see some recent “Error Correct” voids, you might breathe a sigh of relief because these are all voids for which you didn’t have to go in and swipe your card or enter your number. If you see that one of your servers or bartenders entered in a specific menu item and canceled it before ever sending it to the kitchen or bar, it could be their way of finding the price for a particular item and verbally telling the guest that price, but never fully ringing in the item and then keeping the cash. Those “Error Correct” voids you were so happy to see may be signs of restaurant theft.
- Implement server scoring. Find an automatic way to “score” your servers and look at their guest payments. If one server has an unusually high number of cash payments compared to the rest of the team, there may be some cash pocketing going on. There should never be an extreme discrepancy in terms of what kind of payments are used from server to server. Use this process to vet employees who have given you cause for concern, then monitor their behavior throughout one lunch or dinner shift to confirm your suspicions.
Let Avero help you prevent this type of theft in your restaurant — get started today.
