From stealing tips to collecting false refunds and rebates, from preferential deals with suppliers and customers to diverting work to employees’ private interests, from stealing employer assets to misusing company credit cards, the ways a worker can steal are almost limitless.
Yet, a few simple tools and just a handful of hours each month can add 5-8% profits to your business (based on average theft incidents across a wide range of industry sectors). Still, employers either are loathe to implement these simple solutions or are blind to the risks they face.
Logs, annual cash flow and P&L projections, tracking data and yields analyses are the primary weapons to thwart shrinkage.
Many businesses see these logs as redundant and not effective. That is true, if you do not use them or know how to interpret them.
Let’s start with logs. keeping track of such things as time in and out, work hours on a project, mileage, tool crib access provide two benefits. First, just by being tracked, an employee is less likely to exploit vulnerabilities because they see increased risk. Second, when you analyse these logs regularly, you can detect patterns and emerging problems, before they become substantial.
Annual financial statements should be automatic for any business, even if you are the only employee. Using a good accounting software package enables you to generate these reports with the click of a button. If you opt for the less secure spreadsheets, you may miss the minutia of weekly bookkeeping missteps, but your year-end cash flow and P&L statements, compared to ideal yields, will tell you where your profits are bleeding away from your business.
Yields analyses commonly are seen as teh venue of restaurants, who need to know if they need to adjust meal prices to reflect costs differences in ingredients. But they also can tell you, specifically, where those yields are failing and may lead to detection of intentional theft or fraud. But yields analyses work in almost any environment. How many input hours are involved in manufacturing a specific piece of equipment? does the amount of time and the cost per unit fluctuate? Are you generating the gross profit you projected? Now, you can examine to see where that weakness exists. How about supply use, such as gas for welders, vehicle oil changes, mileage for fleets? Yields analyses will reveal secrets you would otherwise have not uncovered.
Typically, any templates can be developed specifically for a business within a few hours, and the time involved in reviewing teh data they provide may take less than a couple of hours each week, yet they may recover hundreds of times that in lost profits.
No Responses