Many quick service restaurants offer meal discounts as a perk of employment, but some employees use their discounts inappropriately, giving discounted or free food to family and friends. This type of theft not only increases food costs, it can also interfere with the accuracy of forecasting and inventory management. That’s why QSR owners need a way to catch food-related theft quickly. DIGIOP has a solution for that challenge.
Pairing Transactions With Video
Point-of-sale transactions can occur in just a few seconds’ time, so when store managers want to review surveillance footage of a specific discounted transaction, they often have to spend an hour or more trying to find the corresponding video clip. DIGIOP CARBON packages transactions with camera footage, so managers find what they need instantly. This pre-packaged reporting functionality is how one QSR caught an employee abusing their meal discount.
What DIGOP Revealed
DIGIOP configures its software to provide managers and owners with only the information they need to see – price overrides, no-sale transactions, or discounts, for example. After DIGIOP began tracking employee discounts for this QSR owner, a suspicious pattern emerged: Near closing time (an illogical time for a food break), several food items were discounted using a shift leader’s code. The corresponding surveillance footage showed that a long-term employee was misusing their discount code to buy food near closing time for family and friends, even on days when they hadn’t worked.
Best Practices
While there’s no way to completely eradicate employee theft in the QSR sector, a comprehensive loss prevention system can help mitigate risk, reduce loss, and increase operational efficiency. Employees who steal often do so more than once, so detecting their first incident of theft can save QSRs a great deal of money in the long run.