I have had three newsagents call me this week about employee theft. Two were hit by employees they trusted who had worked hard at covering their tracks.
The third newsagent has no regard for cash balancing, no tracking of stock sold, no checking of new stock, no oversight of employee behaviour around the assets of the business and no process cash they take from the register for personal use – in front of employees.
If you want to reduce theft in your newsagency:
- Track everything you sell.
- Re-order using your computer system.
- Regularly check stock on hand.
- Be tight in cash management.
- Have a structured end of shift reconciliation process.
- Don’t take out cash for yourself.
- Check how your staff use your software, look for patterns of fraud.
This list is not new. Sadly, there are newsagents being stolen from today who could stop it if they acted on this list.
We agree with Mark and have noticed an increase in this type of insurance claim. Not surprisingly we are also finding an increase in the cost of the claims as well as very little opportunity for recovery outside the “fidelity guarantee” cover under the Business insurance.
Sadly it’s often a trusted employee, which is why the business owner tends to be more relaxed on their security processes in these circumstances. Our experience shows that following an incident the business will tighten their procedures which is successful in preventing further claims. However if these risk management measures were put in place from day one the incident could have been avoided.
Often a period of time has lapsed before the discovery. It is important that you check the loss discovery period in your policy wording as the money section under a business pack policy may have a limited time frame to make the claim and provide a limited sum insured.
As mentioned earlier the policy which provides this cover is called Fidelity Guarantee. The Qsure newsagent policy includes a limit of $20,000 on our level one to four options .