A short YouTube video by Donna Genie offering three practical tips to prevent fraud in a PYOP (paint-your-own-pottery) studio: remove tip jars, closely audit cash expenditures (require receipts), and monitor/limit voided or canceled sales (require manager approval and review void-sales reports). The video closes with social media CTAs and contact info.
Questions this video answers
October 27, 2022.
me@donnayopaccounting.com.
Chapters
Do you know how to stop fraud from happening in your studio? I'm going to give you three tips to watch for to spot fraud in action and catch it early. First off, if you have a tip jar on your counter and it has cash in it, that is like putting a jar of cookies in front of a child. Somebody might dip their hand in the cookie jar and take some, so watch for that. There's not a great way to stop this from happening, but there is a way to eliminate it, and that's by not having that tip jar there. It's too tempting to put the cookies in front of the kids. The second way to help minimize the impact of fraud is to look at cash expenditures in your studio. I would prefer that you don't have any, but if you do have any, pulling money out of the drawer to pay the window washer, to pay for the pizzas for a party, things like that, those can lend themselves to fraud. You want to make sure that every receipt is presented in the drawer if there was a cash expenditure, that everything matches up and that there aren't any weird patterns. Some of this is just making sure that your staff knows you're watching. That's the biggest way to eliminate the fraud. The third way that you will see fraud happen in any retail location are void sales. Here's the process. Someone comes in and buys something and they ring it up and that person pays cash. Well, instead of putting the money in the drawer and giving the receipt, they may print out the receipt, hand it to your guest, and then go back and void that transaction so it doesn't appear in your daily sales and take the cash out of the drawer, put it in their pocket and they have some extra money. You should look at every void sale and you may even want to consider having a manager void. If you've ever been to a a large retail chain, you know that cashier right there can't void out. If they scanned a product twice or if they are returning something, they can't just void that themselves. They have to have a manager come, put the key in the register, or put in a special code now in their computer system to make that void go through so that they know someone's watching. You should be doing the same thing in your studio. Any retail location. The prime way that fraud can happen is through void sales or canceled sales. So in most every point of sale system, there is a way to run a report that just shows you all the voided sales. Look for trends. Is there one employee who has a lot more void sales? Than anybody else. Do you want to set up an option to say that has to be approved by someone? Look at that and make sure that you don't have a little siphon hole where your cash is running out. The holiday season is coming up and as studios get busier, things are a little looser. And sometimes people need extra money for the holidays or they think they do. And we want to make sure that you're protected, that you don't have one bad apple who may be stealing from your studio. Check this out and make sure that you put patches in place to keep these things from happening.
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