A business’s cash handling process can either be streamlined or tedious. But in the fast-paced environment of convenience stores, retail shops, and restaurants, there’s typically not a lot of free time available for employees to continue antiquated cash counting and management practices.
Meeting customer expectations normally requires quick service and dedicated attention from your staff. When they have to pivot and turn their attention to counting cash and managing deposits, you’re risking the chance of customer satisfaction decreasing.
A smart safe is a secure and effective financial solution for businesses, large and small. According to a Globe Newswire article, 85% of high-volume retailers in urban centers have transitioned to smart safes to reduce shrinkage and protect cash flow.
Smart safes aren’t just for high-volume retailers; they offer real advantages for smaller businesses, too. When you factor in bank fees and the labor hours spent manually counting, validating, and reconciling cash, the operational costs quickly add up. Without automated tools, the risk of human error also increases, making cash handling less efficient and more prone to costly mistakes.
Let’s go over how a smart safe can help from start to finish throughout your cash management process.
Handle and Manage Cash Deposits Efficiently
Manual cash deposits often involve balancing tills, counting cash by hand, logging amounts in spreadsheets or ledgers, and preparing physical deposit bags for transport/pick-up. It’s a multi-step process that introduces opportunities for human error and security risks at each stage. What if we told you there was a way to eliminate most of those extra manual steps?
A smart safe simplifies managing cash deposits through the following.
Automatic Validation
When cash is deposited into a smart safe, each bill is automatically counted and scanned for authenticity, helping prevent counterfeit losses and simplifying end-of-day reconciliation. This automated validation process ensures that every dollar collected is legitimate, eliminating the guesswork and manual checks that can slow your team down.
American Security smart safes take it a step further by generating a detailed receipt for every deposit. This not only improves tracking and accountability but also enhances accuracy in your reconciliation process, giving you greater confidence in your cash totals.
Improved User Tracking
All transactions can be logged and attached to a user. This makes it easy to track where money is going and who handled the cash last. If there are any discrepancies or errors found during reconciliation, you, as the owner or manager, will know exactly who to go to to inquire about what occurred.
Credit for Deposits
American Security smart safes offer what’s called “Daily Provisional Credit”, which allows business owners to receive a credit to their bank account for cash deposits before they are picked up by a courier, a quicker way for you to gain access to your cash.
Streamline Shift Changes and Cash Drawer Reconciliation
End-of-shift routines can be some of the most tedious and error-prone times in a cash-based business. Employees are expected to count their tills, reconcile totals, and report discrepancies—all while trying to finish their shifts on time.
A business smart safe minimizes time spent on managing cash through the following.
Expedited Till Counting & Deposits
Since a smart safe can easily count and track deposits, the days of manually closing out and counting tills are over. This helps minimize the amount of time your team takes during their shift to handle and organize the cash in your establishment.
Trackable Money Trail
A smart safe makes accountability tracking a breeze since each user has their own login, and managers spend less time investigating mismatches or inconsistencies because the system tracks every deposit in real time.
Reduce Bank Runs and Improve Cash Logistics
Traditional cash handling requires regular trips to the bank, which can be risky and labor-intensive, especially for businesses without armored courier services. Time spent on bank runs is time taken away from customers and operations.
Improve Timing for Scheduled Bank Runs or Courier Pickups
With a secure smart safe in place, you gain more control over when and how often you need to transport cash. American Security smart business safes allow you to set customizable capacity alerts, so you know exactly when the safe is nearing its limit. This feature helps you plan bank deposits or schedule courier pickups at the right times, reducing unnecessary trips, minimizing risk, and optimizing your cash-handling logistics.
To make courier pickups even easier, American Security offers a service called SureAccess, which eliminates the need for physical safe keys and provides the individual picking up the deposits with a randomly digitized access code via their smartphone. Through this patented technology, you’ll no longer experience missed courier pickups due to lost or misplaced keys.
Remote Reporting
If you pair an AMSEC smart safe with our cash management software, you can easily access financial reports remotely, allowing you to have full visibility over your business location(s). This is perfect for franchises since you can access data insights without physically driving to each location.
Reduce External and Internal Theft
Many people think of theft as mostly external burglars, but employee theft can be quite common as well. By restricting access for employees and ensuring users are attached to the passcodes to access the cash, it’s easy to be able to track when your money is moving in and out of the safe and who’s doing it.
Smart safes also minimize user error, making the day-to-day cash management operations more efficient and less tedious for your staff.
Smart Safes for Business: More Than Just a Storage Container
A smart safe built for business environments shouldn’t simply serve as a storage container for your cash. It should also make your cash flow operations smoother and easier for your employees. By doing so, your teams can better manage high volumes of money while also prioritizing the customer experience.
Counting, verifying, and organizing cash shouldn’t be tedious, which is why American Security smart safes are built with features that give you full control and financial visibility at all times.
Explore our range of smart safes and schedule a consultation with our team, where we can help you determine what features and capabilities would help your business operations run smoothly.