A New Restaurant

Yes, it really does happen.  If your restaurant has grown beyond you and your spouse running everything, chances are good that at least one of your employees is stealing from you to one degree or another.  It could be skimming a little cash from the register, or stealing food from the cooler, or even just helping themselves to some extra meal items.  Regardless of how they are doing it, it is a cost of which you really need to be aware.

Employee theft comes in many forms, and there’s really no way to completely protect yourself from it.  All you can do is to have things in place that make it more difficult for your employees to get away with it.

Types of Employee theft

Under-ringing or tearing up dinner checks after collecting the money

If your restaurant uses hand written dinner checks, or older cash registers that don’t print out meal chits that are directly tied to a server and a dinner check, this is very easy to get away with.  The way it works is, the server gives the customer the bill for the meal, then rings a smaller amount into the cash register, and pockets the extra money.  Or they might not ring it into the register at all, and keep all or the money.

The solution to this is to spend a little more money to purchase a cash register system that makes each server accountable for what they ring up on the register.  While this may not be fool proof, it makes it more difficult for the server to under-ring meals.

Taking food

This is type of theft is just what you think it is; your employees walk into your pantry or cooler, and helps themselves to the food that you purchased for the restaurant.  Watch for employees that need to run back to the cooler or pantry just before they leave your restaurant at the end of their shift.

A couple of things you can do to discourage this type of theft are:

Do frequent food inventories.  People are more likely to steal if they think there isn’t much chance they will get caught.  By doing inventories on a regular basis you will know very quickly that food items are missing.  With that knowledge, it is much easier to narrow down who was working when the food disappears.

Another thing you can do is not allow employees to take any part of their employee meal with them when they leave.  Set a policy that all employees meals are to be eaten on the premises.  Without having this policy, employees will eat part of their meal, then pack the rest to go.  This gives them an excuse to pop into the cooler before they leave.

Charging for time they didn’t work

This requires two or more employees working together.  The first employee in will clock themselves and the second person in, even though the second person hasn’t shown up for work yet.  The second person is now charging you for labor even though they aren’t working.

This type of theft is pretty easy to foil.  Keep an eye on who is scheduled, and make sure they are showing up for work on time.  When you are doing the payroll, make sure you compare the payroll to the schedule to ensure you’re not paying someone who was not scheduled to be on the clock.

Another method that I’ve seen done is to require employees to have their time card initialed by a manager at the beginning and end of the shift.  It is more inconvenient, but it is a very effective method of avoiding time theft.

These are just a couple of the ways employees use to try to get a little something extra.  In reality, there’s no way I could list them all.  Dishonest employees can be very creative in the ways they will steal from you, so you have to be vigilant.  Keep an eye on your cash and your inventory, run background checks on employees.  Most of all make sure your employees know that not only will they be fired and prosecuted for stealing, but anyone who aids abets the thief will lose their jobs as well.

Your cash flow is the life-blood of your business.  When people steal from you, they are hurting your cash flow.  If you loose too much, you can loose your business.  You can’t afford to be soft when it comes to people stealing from you.  When it happens, everyone’s job is at risk.