Choose a POS system that protects you from fraud with strong security and PCI compliance. Today’s merchant faces a barrage of attacks that include:
• employee theft
• return fraud
• hackers
• stolen credit cards
• shoplifting
As an entrepreneur, you want to focus on making sales, but protecting yourself from crime can be just as crucial in helping your business succeed.
Some estimates say that employees steal as much as $50 billion a year from businesses. 75% of employees admit to having stolen at least once from their employer. A POS system that has real-time inventory reporting and great POS analytics can help you pinpoint your inventory valuation shrinkage. ACID does this and also has excellent employee management tools that aid you in tracking which employees are working when losses occur.
In addition to real-time perpetual inventory, ACID gives you powerful options for reconciling actual inventory against the system records without having to stop business to do it. This is very useful in getting to the bottom of theft since pilfered merchandise probably won’t be processed through a POS term. Inventory reconciliation also compensates for employee or supplier errors that can result in uncounted excess inventory. These are significant benefits of POS system and important POS features!
In addition to just counting all of your inventory at once, ACID gives you several options for performing inventory reconciliation. You can configure inventory reconciliation to your needs in ways that suit your business and also target specific high-risk merchandise or cast a wider net with one of these options:
• location, such as a particular warehouse or store,
• a randomized choice of products,
• specific stock SKUs (such as high dollar items),
• your weekly 20% best selling items, and
• many other configurations!
ACID Point of Sale technology keeps track of the stock reconciliation methods you want and need to keep your perpetual inventory accurate. Your employees are prompted to scan products during the stock reconciliation but do not know the strategy you are using. This helps keep them honest.
Knowing your customer is vital to your sales relationship with them, and ACID POS capabilities do a great job of capturing data for you to use in marketing and to make customers feel welcome in your store. However, ACID also tracks all purchases, exchanges, refunds, etc. and can help you identify customers that are not profitable for your store and also might be engaging in return-fraud.
All ACID POS terminals and tablets support the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard and Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS). This assures you the highest level of data POS security and compliance with industry-standard rules. POS PCI compliance is a must Point of Sale function for any modern POS system.
You can also adjust your risk by changing the types of payments you will accept. For instance, you might consider card-not-present transactions (like when a customer phones in orders) too risky and decide to require payment when their order is picked up or delivered. You will also need to choose between allowing less secure transactions with unchipped cards that are swiped or limit your transactions to chipped cards that are inserted into a POS term.
For your highest-dollar items, you might want to require dual-cashier approval where two employees must approve the purchase. You could also define certain levels for particular employee categories, for instance, a high-dollar item might require two regular clerks to approve versus allowing the manager to accept the sale by herself.
There are many things you can do to reduce theft, but you must start with a POS system like ACID that is built for security and flexibility. Talk to us today about what we can do to help protect and grow your business.
About The Author: Madison Russell
Madison has been an avid tech writer for over a decade in point of sale and eCommerce related field. A former software engineer graduate and currently a pretty good cook. Madison loves to spend time reading about innovative software and participate in various new gadget studies.
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