From the moment a customer hands over cash, it should be tracked in the business. Each point of a gap in tracking is a point of possible theft.
This is on my mind today because a retailer colleague recently discovered an employee theft situation where the employee was able to steal undetected for many months because the business did not reconcile daily takings using their POS software. It was a manual process that was not regularly checked again st actual sales and even then, the checking was cursory.
More fool on the retailer for disinterest in managing cash.
The theft would have been stopped or at least seen sooner had they done their end of shift inside the POS software with that data feeding seamlessly and untouched by human hands through to Xero, the accounting software they use. Instead, they recorded cash manually and manually entered data into Xero.
This is a failure of process that was easily exploited by the thief.
Business systems exist to block this.
The more control a business owner exerts on their business by fully using their software and supporting this with black and white processes the less opportunity for employee theft.