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How to cut the cost of inefficient cash handling

If you deal with cash on a regular basis, how can you protect it against poor cash-handling practices? Are there ways to make sure everything adds up?

October 2, 2014

by Wes Wernette, head of marketing, FireKing Security Group

Inefficient cash handling is one of the top issues plaguing operators today, according to the fourth annual cash management study from CSP Daily News. In all four years that the study has been conducted, issues such as counting, recounting, discrepancy reconciling and making deposits have been ranked as a "serious issue" by the vast number of survey respondents.

In fact, this year, the problem with miscounted money and account discrepancies was at 70 percent, up from 62 percent in 2013. What does this mean for your business? If you deal with cash on a regular basis, how can you protect it against poor cash-handling practices? Are there ways to make sure everything adds up?

To help answer these questions, here's a look at some of the specific ways cash-handling procedures tend to become inefficient, along with some suggestions for streamlining these issues:

How cash-handling procedures become inefficient

As the CSP survey reveals, business owners today know proper cash management is a problem — but do they know why? To help uncover what's going on when counting doesn't add up, consider the following:

Manual cash handling. In any industry, good help can be hard to find. And companies that use employees to count cash or manage money must deal not only with extra labor cost, but also with higher risk that comes with manual work. People make mistakes, and these mistakes can lead to financial problems.

Lack of oversight and bookkeeping. Businesses that still rely on age-old pen-and-paper methods of keeping accounts reconciled are missing out on the efficiency of electronic reporting. Likewise, deployers who don't pay attention to financial dealings and ask accountants and managers questions are opening themselves up to risk.

Fear of automation. There are lots of reasons why business owners resist automation. The biggest one comes down to fear. Owners are afraid of the initial investment to purchase equipment; they are worried that machines will break down.

So, in an effort to keep control in an increasingly technology-driven marketplace, they may resist automated equipment and bear the consequences of it.

What to do about cash-handling inefficiencies

Despite this seemingly bleak picture of the pitfalls of cash-handling inefficiencies, there is good news. In fact today's marketplace offers abundant technologies and solutions designed to respond to efficiency issues. Here are some examples to consider:

Automated processes.Any time you can move manual tasks to be more automated, you save your business time and money. In the case of cash handling, you also save your business risk, as it's much less likely for human error to get involved. So look for technology solutions that will take some of the day-to-day tasks out of your employees' hands.

Real-time reporting.When accounts update in real time, it's much easier to make informed decisions and to know where money is and why.

Smart cash management safes.Smart safes are called "smart" because they can "count the bills, provide a deposit receipt and communicate the cash totals to the bank each day," according to Joan Brancaccio, product management executive at Bank of America.

Today's market includes stand-alone units, safes with cloud-based business intelligence, rolled-coin vending safes and more. Because they can offer seamless integration with your systems and because they protect your cash from both robberies and poor managing, safes are a good way to switch your cash-handling process from reactive to proactive.

The fact is that even with all the technological advancements today, it's hard to do business without handling cash — and that's why finding efficient ways to handle and manage cash is so vital for businesses. Using new technologies, business owners can make their systems more efficient — freeing up cash, reducing overhead and making systems run more smoothly.

New Albany, Indiana-based FireKing Security Group (www.fireking.com) is a provider of asset protection products and services.

photo courtesy of images money | flickr