By: Nathan Lewis
The original cash register was created as a theft deterrent. In an age where businesses only hired family to work in the store cash registers were invented to stop family members from stealing from one another. Even in the beginning these earliest cash registers had a printer to record the transaction. This internal printer became known as a journal printer and can still be found on point of sale systems today.
Even though most point of sale systems have an electronic journal that records the transactions on a hard drive, there are still times when a printed journal tape is necessary. A journal printer is the perfect answer when you need to view exactly what was printed on the customer receipt as it is a mirror image of that document.
Not too many years ago we installed a simple point of sale system in a diner. The owner felt that he was losing money but could not pinpoint the source. He felt that installing the point of sale system might slow the theft, he never dreamt that he would find the source and completely eliminate the problem.
The restaurant used hand written tickets to take and process the orders. The kitchen prepared the food from these tickets and the same ticket was used by the customer when it came time to pay. So as to not interrupt the flow of the restaurant we decided to continue to use these hand written tickets and use the point of sale system to add the total for the order and validate the hand written ticket with the total amount paid by the customer.
This validation was a single line printed on the back of the ticket that showed the date, time, cashier name and amount paid by the customer. Each ticket entered required a validation of a ticket before the next ticket could be entered.
After a month of use the owner called asking for some assistance in understanding some of the tickets he had. It seems that some of the tickets had multiple validations instead of the single line that should be on them.
We took the tickets for a single day and compared them to the journal tape for the same day. The journal tape showed every transaction for that day and we easily matched the majority of the tickets to the sales recorded on the journal.
We found several orders on the journal that were not matched to any of the tickets. These unmatched orders amounted to $40 - $50. We examined other days and found the identical problem with unmatched transactions.
Someone was under recording the orders correctly into the point of sale system. They were then validating a single ticket for these mis-entered sales in order to hide their theft. We were able to identify thefts in excess of $1,200 per month by a single cashier/waitress.
Through the use of a simple point of sale system, a journal tape and a validation feature we were able to pinpoint a thief, calculate the amount stolen and help a restaurant owner stop a major problem with his profitability.
Journal printers are a valid part of a point of sale system and can be the silent watchdog for your operation while you are out. In the case of this restaurant owner, he took a vacation the following month on the increased revenues from his point of sale system.
Nathan Lewis has over 25 years of experience applying technology to solve complex small business problems.
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