How Cash Can Optimize Operations, Limit Theft, Add Efficiency, and Cut Costs
Headlines continue to highlight the divisive nature of going cashless. As they should.
After all, a retailer’s decision to remove a customer’s right to a method of payment is problematic. And its problematic nature makes it newsworthy.
It’s particularly problematic when there’s an alternative solution for retailers. One that lets them tackle the very issues that they attempt to quell by going cashless, namely optimizing operations, limiting theft, cutting costs, and adding efficiency.
Cash Operations Management, with its cash recycling capability, lets retailers accept cash and simultaneously reduce the costs, errors, inefficiencies, and opportunities for theft associated with traditional management of cash.
By blending biometric-based hardware and cloud-based software to create cash recycling, Cash Operations Management automates reconciliation and tracks the cash journey from start of shift through bank deposit. This eliminates cash counting – an agent for inefficiency, high cost, and tremendous error and an overall non-value add to a retailer’s operations.
Here’s a breakdown of why this method for essentially “digitizing cash” allows retailers to cash in on cash for the good of their operations and the good of their customers.
Concern 1: Collecting Cash Adds a Burden to Retail’s Front and Back Office Operations
Cash Operations Management’s built-in automation eliminates till counting. By leveraging robotics, the cash recycling hardware dispenses till mixes and distributes change throughout shift. By doing so, employees spend more time with customers. It also removes management’s need to fill and count till mixes throughout shifts.
Concern 2: Counting Cash Creates Costly Error and Inefficiency
Cash Operations Management auto reconciles, which, in turn, eliminates management’s need to count cash at the end of shift and compare their count to spreadsheets – something particularly problematic should one’s count not match Excel’s records.
Also, as mentioned, the solution eliminates the need to count cash for till mix purposes.
Concern 3: Cash Invites Theft
Not so.
By adding accountability, Cash Operations Management’s auto-reconciliation and comprehensive tracking capabilities decrease opportunity for internal theft. The cash recycling hardware that dispenses cash through biometrics, also acts as a safe – a deterrent for internal and external theft.
Finally, by facilitating courier management, Cash Operations Management requires less cash to be on hand overall. Therefore, should an attempted robbery be successful after overcoming the solution’s other theft prevention tools, the actual amount of cash that could be stolen is decreased.
Concern 4: Accepting Cash is Expensive
So is losing customers. And so is essentially handing out free product when a customer can’t pay without cash, which is the strategy that some cashless businesses opt for when a customer’s only payment option is cash.
And Cash Operations Management’s automation tackles other traditional expenses associated with managing cash as described above. Plus, by automating cash management, the cost of cash may actually be less than credit card processing fees in certain scenarios.
Technology can be used for the good. So why not use it to help retailers and consumers alike?