News

Hang on to more of your money

April 24, 2005

As a payment method, cash has major advantages: it's common; it's readily available to everyone; and it doesn't require technology for it to change hands.

But it also has one major vulnerability: If you lose it or if someone takes it, it's gone - and no paper trail or electronic refund will put it back.

Cashless transactions may be gaining ground, but some businesses still want to see green. Freestate Petroleum, for instance, operates nine gasoline stations in Maryland, and all of them are cash-only. That means a lot of currency can accumulate, creating some very real security concerns.

"We're pretty high-volume facilities, and we're really conscious about keeping no money in the drawer, because that's the biggest deterrent to robbery," said Kathy Shen, station supervisor with Freestate.

There's a paradox at work here: Checkout personnel need to deposit funds and make change, but allowing that access to the cash drawer makes robbery fairly easy to pull off.

"This is a crucial moment," said Mike Canaan, president of Renton, Wash.-based Trident Investigative Services. "If the money doesn't get in the till or in the safe, we have shrinkage."

"The cash register has always been a vulnerable point in cash management because it's not secured, and by its very nature must always be accessible," said Ed McGunn, president of Posen, Ill.-based Corporate Safe Specialists, a provider of cash management solutions.

"If cash flow skips this resting spot and goes directly into the safe, armed robbery risk is reduced and internal losses are minimized because the cash is `safe in the safe,'" he said.

Safe and secure

The kind of safe that he's referring to is much more than a big metal box with a drop-slot. Today's safes can include bill acceptors, allowing store personnel to feed bills directly in.

For Freestate, Corporate Safe Specialists designed a custom machine with two bill validators and a coin unit. The device sits next to the store's point-of-sale system, allowing cashiers to insert bills into the safe rather than into a till.

According to Shen, the safes allow the stores to put strict money controls in place. For instance, the company requires any bill $10 or higher to be deposited into the safe - meaning there are never large sums of money in the cash drawer. As a system, this is more secure and reliable than reminding clerks to make a drop every hour or so.

Canaan added that traditional safe drops, usually done in the manager's office, are not ideal anyway. "Walking around with large amounts of cash in the pocket to be put into a safe drop in the back - that's not wise," he said.

And feeding the bills through the safe's bill validator has an added bonus: It can count the money. "What once would take maybe half an hour, now takes five minutes," Shen said.

"It helps the managers out a lot. It means less time in the back room, so they're out there with the customers and the other employees."