5 STAFF TRICKS THAT CAN COST YOU DEARLY

I once met a publican who said that when it came to money and alcohol, he wouldn’t trust his own mother to work for him! While this may be a little severe, it shows how worried some business owners are about managing their food & beverage business.

Some staff tricks can go undetected indefinitely and I’m sure you all have your own horror stories about theft and fraud which you or a colleague were victims of. We are all to aware of the attractiveness of the industry to less than honest employees and so to this end, we have compiled a list of five staff tricks which could be costing you thousands. More importantly, we have explained ways to prevent these tricks in the future. 

1.                   Diluting Spirits to get more from each bottle and pocketing the cash difference.

This is quite common and may go unnoticed unless actually witnessed. There are severe penalties from Customs and Excise if samples are taken from the bar and alcohol by volume (ABV) is determined to be less than the advertised ABV on the bottle. Some bottles come with built in pourers that prevent refilling, however for the remainder of the bottles, purchase a hydrometer from a home wine making supplies shop and actually test the alcoholic content of random bottles to see if this is happening in your premises. Beware also of staff topping up spirit bottles with water before an inventory to cover up for the drinks they had the previous night.

2.                   Claiming the Opening Float was incorrect and pocketing the cash they said was short.

The main reasons that staff can get away with such claims are that procedures in-house are not tight enough to dispute such claims with the staff or systems are such that theft can occur unnoticed. To prevent cah float fraud, establish a procedure whereby each shift must account and sign for opening and closing float quantities. In between shifts (overnight for example) keep the float box locked in a safe. That way the opening shift float should always equalt the previous closing float. Any difference can now be tracked back to a small number of staff and times.

3.                   Staff claiming that a table of customers walked out without paying and pocketing the cash.

While you will invariably have a walk out, the occurrences should be rare. To prevent staff from using this as an alibi, establish the procedure that staff are accountable for walk outs. If staff members have been assigned a section to take care of, then they should be aware of what stage each table is at, how close they are to finishing etc. They should therefore spot a walk out quickly and notify a manger who can pursue the customers. You may be surprised how many fewer walk outs you have when staff have to pay for them. In addition, ensure staff cannot void entire bills from the POS or destroy dockets to hide walkouts.

4.                   Placing full bottles of spirits and cans in the bottle bin and collecting them from the yard on the way home.

Unbelievable as it may sound, this has happened to a client of ours and it took a long time to figure out where the losses were occurring. To prevent this from happening, establish a par stock in your bar. This is most likely to occur with items like vodka, brandy, Bacardi, tequila rather than obscure liqueurs. With a par stock system, you will always have the same number of bottles in the bar, whether full or empty. So if you decide that you need three bottles of vodka in the bar, you may have two full and one on optic at the start of the night and one full, one on optic and one in the bottle bin at the end of the night. Either way, it should always be three bottles of vodka that are present in the bar. Spot check the bottles you are having problems with it on regular occasions. Staff wanting full bottles from the store can only do so by giving you the empty bottle in exchange, therefore maintaining your three bottles. You will find yourself subconsciously checking that your par stock is present as you walk through the bar and you will be closer to finding out if bottles are going missing this way.

5.         Staff using the Open Food and Open Drink buttons to ring in items at different prices than those set on your menu and pocketing the difference

If you want to control your margins, you need to find a way around having buttons on your till that can be used for whatever use the staff please. I have worked with bars where staff had two pricing levels for drinks: one for their friends and the other for regular customers. More worrying still is the ability for staff to charge a large table the full menu price for their meal and only ring in a portion of this bill in the open food button and pocketing the difference. If you are a small bar or restaurant, it is unlikely you will need to have an open button on the till as you should have sufficient buttons on your till for all products sold. The alternative is to have PLU numbers (price look up) which allows you assign items a code that can be typed in to the till if you have too few buttons on the keypad. If you are a large establishment with many tills, then you probably have the ability to easily change the prices and products across all tills centrally. This allows you to create a specific PLU or button for special offers or “catch of the day” etc and yet still retain itemised control over your sales.

While this list is by no means exhaustative and does in fact probably raise more questions about your operation than before you started reading it, it should focus you to the fact that there is no substitute for alertness and astuteness when it comes to staff handling cash and alcohol.

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