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A 2019 survey of National Retail Federation (NRF) members revealed that the industry is taking an estimated $50.6 billion hit due to shrinkage alone. For the average business, that equates to about 1.38 percent of your revenue needlessly lost. However, these numbers do not fully capture all of the other side effects and consequences that shrinkage could have on your business, including on its overall operational health, its employee morale, and even the experiences and prices it presents to its customers.
Fortunately, retailers are not alone in their fight against shrinkage. Advances in technology have given managers and owners new tools and methods for preventing and identifying shrinkage so that it doesn’t affect their bottom line.
So is your retail business ready to take your loss prevention efforts to the next level?
Emerging Loss Prevention Strategies
Despite the rise in online shopping, the same 2019 NRF study noted that nearly 43 percent of all fraud committed against retailers is still occurring in their brick-and-mortar stores. Because of this, about 68 percent of the study’s respondents are increasing their loss prevention budgets to mitigate the risk to their overall profitability. Ultimately, what this means is that shrinkage and the threat it poses is hitting retailers with a figurative one-two punch.
Tactically, retailers are implementing programs including employee awareness and education initiatives, smart CCTV camera technology, alarms, and point-of-sale data mining. However, these efforts are often single purpose and are unable to integrate into a retailer’s larger cash management strategy.
For these reasons, many retailers are beginning to turn toward the use of smart safes.
Smart Safe Overview
Smart safes bring together technological and design advances to deliver unmatched cash security for retailers of all sizes. Bringing the best of traditional safes with a range of sizes and features available to meet your stores’ needs, smart safes can improve cash flow visibility, perform basic transaction validation and facilitation functions, and check currency for counterfeit bills.
With these new, modern devices, no longer are safes just the physically imposing presence in a store’s back room. Instead, a smart safe can be an invaluable way to improve cash handling, storage, and management.
Smart Safes Deliver Value
On a day-to-day basis, smart safes log cash intake and withdrawal transactions with a timestamp, a teller account, and the store’s location. With this information, retailers are able to review cash flow trends on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis for each retail site, at an employee account level, or across a business’ larger network. This information can then be used to inform business decisions, identify sources of shrinkage, and improve overall cash management.
Additionally, smart safes can also allow your business to take advantage of a bank feature called provisional or advanced credit. Thanks to the built-in transaction validation, logging capability, and security features of smart safes, banks are able to use your business’ cash flow logs to credit funds back to your business, reducing the effort and time for reinvestment. Additionally, this provisional credit can be applied overnight or before a formal deposit or armored truck pickup, when cash is already safely stored within the smart safe within organized cassettes.
What’s Next?
Ultimately, every business has to identify the best way to combat the ever-present threat of retail shrink. Although there is a range of loss prevention strategies out there, none provide the level of physical cash security, transaction logging, and cash management integration provided by smart safes.
To talk through the unique loss prevention needs of your retail business and learn more about smart safe solutions, reach out to the team at Burroughs here.
