Tales of the Till Perfecting Bar Cash Handling Techniques

This episode peels back the curtain on the vital role of cash management in the bar industry, a lesson in finance that might just save your business from the perils of poor oversight. I'll walk you through the undeniable benefits of accepting cash—think zero transaction fees and immediate fund access—and share the tricks of the trade that keep your cash flow smooth and secure.

Dive into the world of cash drops as I recount my journey mastering the art of cash management in bars without the watchful eyes of constant management. You'll learn how streamlining the process not only secures your servers' hard-earned tips but also how nightly cash drawer rituals and savvy petty cash handling can prevent theft and ensure every dollar is accounted for. It's all about practical, actionable strategies that fortify your financial defenses.

Then, brace yourself for a tale of deceit that even the most seasoned bartender could fall victim to—counterfeit currency. We'll explore verification techniques and internal controls that shield your revenue from both external fraudsters and internal mishaps. By the end of our time together, you'll be equipped with the knowledge to turn your bar's cash management from a potential headache into a profit-protecting powerhouse.

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Welcome to the Bar Business Podcast, the ultimate resource for bar owners looking to elevate their businesses to the next level. Our podcast is packed with valuable insights, expert advice, and inspiring stories from successful bar owners and industry professionals. Tune in to learn everything from how to craft the perfect cocktail menu to how to manage your staff effectively. Our mission is to help you thrive in the competitive bar industry and achieve your business goals.

Special thank you to our benchmarking data partner Starfish. Starfish works with your bookkeeping software by using AI to help you make smart data-driven decisions and maximize your profits while giving you benchmarking data to understand how you compare to the industry at large.

For more information on how to spend less time working in your bar and more time working on your bar:
The Bar Business Podcast Website
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Chris' Book 'How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business'
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Transcript

Announcer: 0:00

You're listening to the Bar Business Podcast where every week, your host, chris Schneider, brings you information, strategies and news on the bar industry, giving you the competitive edge you need to start working on your bar rather than in your bar.

Chris Schneider: 0:18

Hello and welcome to this week's edition of the Bar Business Podcast, your ultimate resource for bar owners. I'm your host, chris Schneider, and in today's episode, we're going to talk all about cash and, more specifically, cash management. So we talk about finances a lot. We've talked a lot about books and inventory and aspects of the financial management of bars, but one thing we haven't really touched on yet is cash management, and so obviously, cash is money, and when we're talking money, cash matters. Now, physical cash. It has a lot of benefits. It also has a lot of issues, so we're going to dive in there and the bottom line as we go through all of this is that unless you have proper cash management in place, unless you have proper controls on your cash, it's very difficult to not lose some, whether that's through theft, whether that's through poor accounting, whether that's just through sloppy policies and procedures. Cash is something that you have to watch very closely, and I think we all understand that. But unfortunately, the number of businesses that I see and that I work with and this is true, this is true with restaurants, this is true with businesses in other industries that I've worked with Management is not something that people always treat seriously and it's something that we always should treat seriously, especially given that for a lot of bars, cash is still a significant chunk of the money coming in the door, and obviously there are some places around the country and around the world that cash has become not a used method of payment, where almost everything's moved to a court. I know there are some bars, and definitely there are restaurants out there, that have gotten rid of cash altogether. Heck, a lot of the bar suppliers have gotten rid of taking cash altogether. Heck, a lot of our suppliers have gotten rid of taking cash altogether. But even though some folks don't, the majority of the world and the majority of the United States we're still very cash heavy. Now, that's not to say that cash is making up more than 50% of our sales, but it definitely makes up a percentage and managing that cash is very important. So, like I said, we're going to talk some about the benefits of cash, some about the issues with cash. We'll get into daily cash management, talk some about petty cash and cash drawers and how to deal with those specifically, and then we'll wrap up with some cash safety and some ways to avoid theft of your cash. So, as we're talking about cash, I know a lot of people are moving away from it.

Chris Schneider: 2:43

Frankly, I like cash more than any other way of getting paid, and that's because I think the benefits with cash outweigh the issues with cash. Now, I'm sure there are some of you that disagree with me, and that's fine, but to me, cash is wonderful because it's the only way that you get paid for free. I mean, I guess you could also get paid for free on a check, but I don't know anybody in the bar business that's going to accept a check because, well, we're not sure whether or not it will bounce. But cash, you get the cash. You keep 100% of the cash. A $50 bill is a $50 bill. Now, if you think about credit cards, you get paid a hundred bucks. You're getting 90. If you were using Venmo or Cash App or something like that, you could also get hit by fees. Paypal has fees to transfer money. Achs are not always free. Wire transfers are definitely not free. Cash is always free to accept. So I like cash because you're not paying money to get paid and cash is really the only vehicle that exists right now where that is true.

Chris Schneider: 3:47

The other great thing about cash is if I go into your bar on a Friday night and I run up a $100 tab and I pay you with a credit card, that money is probably hitting your account Tuesday, maybe Monday if you have a really, really good processor. But the banks are closed over the weekend. That money doesn't flow over the weekend and so you're not getting paid. When you actually complete the transaction, you're getting paid a few days later is when you have access to your money With cash. If you hand me a $50 bill, I can walk out the door and go to a business down the street and hand them a $50 bill. There's zero holding period between when you can receive it and when you can use it.

Chris Schneider: 4:25

The other huge benefit of cash and this is changing as we're having a generational shift and who's working in hospitality but I promise you all of your older team members and when I say older I really mean millennials, Gen X, baby boomers if you still have servers and bartenders, they're baby boomers, which there probably aren't many, but I'm sure there are a few out there they really like cash. Gen Z maybe they're not as worried about having cash in their pocket, but I don't know a server or bartender that doesn't want to walk at the end of the night with their tips in cash in their pocket, and so employees most of your team probably prefers to get paid their tips and cash at the end of the night rather than going to a debit card or showing up on their paycheck or something like that, because then they have the same issues you do. They could be paying to get that money and they could be waiting to get that money because there's some sort of holding period, rather than just walking out the door with cash where they can go down the street and spend that cash immediately. And, for that matter, as the people in the bar business, when we have other restaurants employees coming into our stores after they get off work to spend money, the more cash those folks have in their pocket, the more cash they're likely to spend when they visit our bar after work. So cash does have a lot of benefits, and in a lot of ways, cash if you're just looking at the benefit side of it is actually a superior form of payment. You're not paying to collect it, it's immediately usable, there's no holding period. Everybody likes having it. It is the easiest way to transfer a value for a good or service.

Chris Schneider: 6:03

Now, with that, though, there are some issues with cash, because cash you can lose it, right. The problem with cash is you have a $1 bill and if you lose that $1 bill, you no longer have a dollar. Someone can steal it and you have to transport it to the bank. You can't just sit in the bar and do nothing. But those issues are not that bad, and so let's talk about some of these in detail.

Chris Schneider: 6:30

So one of the big issues and this is something I mentioned when I was talking about benefits of cash a second ago a lot of suppliers don't take cash anymore, and so where it used to be that you could bring in a bunch of cash and then pay for your beer order in cash, most beer delivery guys are not allowed to accept cash at this point. That's a shame. I used to love paying my beer guys. I'd get deliveries Monday morning. I'd pay them from the cash that came in over the weekend. Boom, boom, boom. We're all done, they're paid. I don't have to worry about it. It was easy. But most suppliers won't take cash anymore. You do have to get up and take your cash to the bank. It is easy to steal it, and that also means before you take your cash to the bank. You need safes and you probably need a safe with multiple compartments or multiple safes to actually do cash management. Well and we'll get into some of those is of what equipment you need and some of the best practices when it comes to safes and cash handling here in a moment.

Chris Schneider: 7:25

Another issue with cash and there are some banks that do this, there are some banks that don't, but some banks actually charge you to deposit cash. A lot of banks say, well, if you deposit over X amount of money in a month, we're going to charge you for cash deposits. There are also a lot of banks that don't charge for cash deposits. So it's perfectly reasonable to find a bank that's close to you that doesn't require you to pay much for cash deposits or has a really high limit. You know if they charge you for cash deposits. But the first $30,000 a month is free for most bars. You're going to be all right and not cross $30,000 in cash Because, if you think about it, a lot of bars nowadays you're 70% credit cards, 60% credit cards, so you're doing $80,000 or $100,000 a month to come up against that $30,000 cash limit. Now I have seen some other banks that charge fees for anything over a couple thousand dollars worth of deposits, I wouldn't use those as a bar, or I would talk to the bank and see if there was a way to get those fees waived, or that just a little bit for your business.

Chris Schneider: 8:36

Now, the other issue with cash is because it can be stolen, because, especially with coins, you can drop them. It's easy to lose cash. You need to have systems in place to account for every penny, and I really mean that every single penny, because, as we all know, in an ideal world you would never have an issue with your drawer being over by a penny or under by a penny. You would never have an issue with someone giving a nickel or giving a quarter has changed when they should have given a nickel. You would never have an issue with $1 bills sticking together and being short because someone got $2 and changed, because they refreshed bills as opposed to $1 and changed that they should have gotten. But the thing is, as long as you have systems in place, as long as you have a good way to account for this, your gain loss on cash or your overshort on cap should be very little and, frankly, if it's not, that's indicative of another problem that you need to look into. So those are kind of the benefits and some of the issues with cash.

Chris Schneider: 9:42

But, like I just said, one of the easiest ways to get rid of issues with cash is to put in place really good daily cash management. And so you do need this system that's going to account for your cash every day, and a lot of people like to do this in high-tech ways with spreadsheets and different things on the computer. That is all great, that can work, but, to be real honest with you, in my experience cash is a pretty low-tech item. Right, it's the simplest form of transferring money back and forth. It's existed for hundreds and hundreds of years and, frankly, a low-tech system sometimes is the right solution, and so what I always like to do is make cash forms.

Chris Schneider: 10:28

So when I say cash form, I used to call them cash to account for forms. That's a pretty common name if you look around, but there are also different names. You can call the form. It doesn't matter. It's a slip of paper that has some spaces on it to fill in different things, and so the big thing here is that you say and all of this should come off your Z, essentially your POS report, or the Z from your register if you're still not using the POS system and using register. I guess if you're doing a lot of cash management, it could be possible, but I think the numbers of people not using POS system are very, very small nowadays. So when you run your POS system at the end of the night you run your final end of the night reports you get that Z.

Chris Schneider: 11:06

It should have cash information on there. It should tell you how much cash came in, if there were any paid outs, all that sort of good stuff. So you're going to copy a lot of that information over this form. And what's important with the form is the top number, where you're starting, should be the amount of cash that came in and the bottom number should be the amount of cash going to the bank and what's in between that. So what's going to be in between there is if you had paid out, so did you do any cash paid outs of your drawer? And there are all sorts of different reasons you could do a cash paid out from your drawer. But if you do, that needs to be recorded on that form. You're also paying out tips in cash. So the tips paid out should be on that form, because you know cash in, we know cash out and again that bottom number there should be cash coming to the bank.

Chris Schneider: 11:58

Now, if you are doing a lot of cash, even if you're not doing a lot of cash, one thing I highly recommend is to go purchase cash deposit slips that are not the cheap little slips they give you at the bank, but a real cash deposit book and one that has carbon copies so that you take the cash for the day say it's 250 bucks from the bank. You fill out your deposit slip, that top deposit slip can go with that money in an envelope to take to the bank, with that money in an envelope to take to the bank and the copy flip can get stapled to that form. And if you staple your Z and that copy to the form and then when you go deposit that money in the bank you get a receipt, you staple that receipt to the form. All those numbers should line up and that's an easy way, especially if you're an owner and you're not there all the time to be able to double check what's going on, because you know what it should have been based on the Z and the form. You know what it was when it was prepared to go to the bank and then you know what it was or what the bank actually received, and it's possible for those two numbers to be off for a couple of reasons it could be counterfeiting, it could be theft, it could be miscounting, but those numbers, 99 times out of 100, should always be identical. So you need that cash form and that needs to be part of either your closing routine at the end of the night or your opening routine at the beginning of every day.

Chris Schneider: 13:18

Now, in order to make a whole system like this work especially if you're in a situation where you don't have management there 24-7 or all the hours that you're open, or if you have bartenders that act as managers at night kind of key shift people that don't really have access to the safe and everything you need a cash drop system. It also works really well because your servers can drop their money. Assuming that they're receiving cash and they owe cash, they can drop that money in the safe as well before they leave for them. And the easiest way to do a cash drop system and this will sound kind of funny, but I've done this in multiple establishments of my own. I've set other people up with the system and it works exceedingly well is to go to Office Depot Staples a place like that right before school starts for the year and to buy pencil cases, and that way they can put the slip, their cash, in the pencil case. You get a drop safe that they can drop that into. They drop that in the drop safe. That cash is totally untouchable by anyone else in the draft safe. That cache is totally untouchable by anyone else and in the morning or at night, whenever you're going through all your cache, you can open that safe up, pull out that pencil case. You have one server's information, one server's cache. You can verify everything as you're doing your count.

Chris Schneider: 14:40

The other good thing about pencil cases is it's reusable right. You're not going to go through 50 envelopes a day working through cash, which to me is a big benefit, because it's too much waste and expense not to just go buy something for 50 cents on sale during back to school time. That actually works. Another thing about daily cash management and this is always true all the money should come out of your drawers at night, unless you have a safe large enough for your drawers to actually go in the safe. You need a separate pencil case just for the drawer so that they can empty out all the money in the drawer and throw it in there. Now it doesn't have to necessarily be the change.

Chris Schneider: 15:20

Usually what I would have folks do is just take the cash out, put the cash in the envelope, throw the drawer on top of the safe with the change in it and, if you can, you want to actually leave the physical drawer overnight. Now some POS systems won't let you do that, but if you can leave the drawer opener overnight, that's always a good idea, because somebody breaks in to rob you, which, let's be honest, to the bar business it's going to happen. With my main bar. I had somebody tried to rob me About every 18 months. Somebody would break in and normally the alarms would go off and they'd run away. But a few times there were alarm issues or they cut power, cut phone lines, things like that and get in and walk around for a little bit. And in those having the cash drawer shut definitely not having cash in the cash drawer, but just physically having the cash drawer open prevented them from breaking it open because there's no benefit. They know there's no money to get. If it's closed they might take your cash drawer, they might break your cash drawer and there's four or five hundred bucks that you've lost on top of everything else in this terrible situation. So when you can leave your cash drawer empty and open overnight.

Chris Schneider: 16:31

Now the two main types of cash, or the two main spaces that you're going to have cash in a bar, is you're going to have cash drawers and petty cash. So I want to get into both of those in detail a little bit. Now let's start with petty cash, because petty cash is cash that you keep in your safe, and petty cash is normally going to be there to serve two purposes. One, it's your change. So all your coinage, your $1 bills, your $5 bills, everything that you're going to switch out in the morning to get rid of those larger bills, that larger cash that you're going to go deposit the bank and make change and be ready for your day, that's in your petty cash. The other purpose of petty cash is incidental, so you have to run to the grocery store and buy five things. You can grab that money out of petty cash.

Chris Schneider: 17:19

Now, with that said, one thing that's absolutely important to remember and a lot of small business owners frankly forget this or don't care about this, but it is actually important. Petty cash is not your cash. Even if you own the bar alone, petty cash is not your cash. It's not just some magic box in your safe that you want to grab a couple hundred bucks. You go in there, you grab a couple hundred bucks and you don't worry about it. Your petty cash has to be treated like any other financial thing in your business. It needs to be accurate, it needs to be recorded. There needs to be an exact understanding of every penny that went in and out. Now that's not to say and I will firmly admit I did this a few times I'd go in there, I'd grab a hundred bucks, I'd leave an IOU for dollars. That way my manager that was counting the next day knew okay, chris took a hundred bucks out. This is accounted for in that IOU. We just counted like cash. So it worked.

Chris Schneider: 18:19

But your petty cash should be treated as a business asset, not like cash. You go in and randomly grab and along those lines it is mostly change, it's smaller bills. Usually it needs to be sufficient that you can run three, four, five, three or four days and not need to go to the bank for more change, because a lot of times if you have a holiday weekend. The bank is open Friday. You go. You get more change. Saturday, sunday, monday, tuesday morning. Even you need enough change to cover all of those days. So it should be a relatively significant amount of cash, depending upon how much cash your business actually goes through day to day.

Chris Schneider: 18:58

Now the other thing to consider with your penny cash is that it needs a log. So to know the cash going in and out, you need that log. And I'm not saying you have to log every time. You take a $10 bill and grab a roll of quarters Taking out $10, you're putting in $10, there's nothing going on. But if you go anywhere, if you do anything, that needs to be logged down and you need to replenish your cash every day or keep your cash the same every day. So if you take 50 bucks out to go to the grocery store and buy something and you come back and let's just say what you bought at the grocery store was exactly 50 bucks, whether you're doing your account and your money that night before you leave or the next morning when you come in, one of the things you should do is to replenish that cash from the cash deposit you would be taking to the bank. So there needs to be a line on your cash to account form for replenishing petty cash, but also that keeps that petty cash number solid.

Chris Schneider: 19:51

I have seen a lot of businesses over the years that say, well, you know, we have this safe and people go in there and they grab money and we don't really have a log of it and it's not really the same amount of money all the time. And all I hear when someone says it, all I hear is everyone with access to my safe could grab a $20 bill and I would never know the difference. And so you need to make sure that you have systems in place and that it's always the same amount of money. So that cannot happen and along those lines. This never happened to me, but it actually did happen at a place where I worked back in the day where someone was counting cap and this was one of the managers. I don't know that we ever figured out who it was. It might have been one of the employees, but we don't think so, because this was petty cash in the safe and you have stacks of ones and stacks of fives and a stack of fives. The way we were doing it, we had 25s in the stack and it was 100 bucks. Well, they weren't, and somebody was taking like a couple bills off this stack and a couple bills off that stack, and so we were counting the money every day, but we weren't counting each individual bill in a stack, which you should always do, because that money went out. No one ever noticed it, it went in the drawers and then people were short cash and it created a whole situation that we eventually figured out or I should say they eventually figured out, because this was before I was working with cameras and different things to figure out what was actually going on.

Chris Schneider: 21:16

And so, with your petty cash, make sure not only you replenish every day, not only do you run a consistent amount to make sure that you're limiting people's ability to steal your cash, but also make sure that you're limiting people's ability to steal your cash, but also make sure that you're counting any stacks of cash, any cash wraps. You have to ensure that what says $100 or what says $500 is actually $100 or $500. Now, with cash drawers, that's the other main place you're going to have cash, and cash drawers can be a little bit more difficult to manage than petty cash, because you think petty cash it's in your safe. In most small bars, that means an owner and maybe a manager or two has access to that safe. Your cash drawer is essentially everyone has access to and just like petty cash, one of the biggest things on a cash drawer is to make sure that you always have a standardized starting amount.

Chris Schneider: 22:01

If you don't have a standardized starting amount, you're going to have cash loss. You might have cash gain, but you're more you're going to have cash loss. You might have cash gain, but you're more likely not going to have cash loss. You're going to confuse your bartenders. It's going to make it very hard to determine if there is a cash issue and, if there is one, almost impossible to figure out why there is a cash issue. So your drawers need to have the same amount of money in them every day, whether it's $500 or $1,000 or $200. It needs to be the same every day starting out.

Chris Schneider: 22:32

And if you have multiple shifts so say you're open for a lunch and a day shift and then you have a dinner and a night shift you should have two drawers, one for each shift. And the reason behind that is it prevents your bartenders from having issues, it limits who's in a drawer and it makes it more accountable to you who did what with what cash. It also makes it harder for your team to steal from each other. Now, on those lines, you have multiple drawers for multiple shifts. You should only have one person in a drawer. Now, I know there are some bars where you have multiple bartenders behind the bar and multiple people maybe going in and out of the drawer. That's okay if you don't have another choice, but ideally, in a perfect world, only one member of your team outside of ownership and management is touching a drawer at a time. Servers who are not behind the bar should never be in your cash drawer. If they need change, they should talk to a bartender. They should never again, never be in your cash drawer, and I cannot overemphasize that enough. But you want one person that has access to your cash drawer at any given time.

Chris Schneider: 23:38

Now, one thing that will always happen with cash drawers, and this is just because people miscount. Sometimes people give more money than they're supposed to. Sometimes dollars stick together. All sorts of things can happen, but you will be over or short some amount on almost a daily basis, and when I say over or short some amount, I'm talking about 25 cents a dollar of 10, seven cents, small amounts like that. If it's two, three, four4, that's starting to get into the realm where I start to really scrutinize that and try to figure out why it's going on. If it's $5 plus, to me that is an urgent issue that needs to be dealt with right away to figure out what's going on with cash, especially if this is happening on a regular basis.

Chris Schneider: 24:22

Now, with that overshort, in theory we should be recording that overshort, putting it on our books, doing all of that, what I like to do and this is kind of a cheat to the whole system, but it works as part of the system because only managers are doing this. But when your managers are getting drawers ready again, whether that's at night or in the morning, and you're counting through the drawers and you realize, okay, this drawer is over by a quarter, you grab a quarter out. You throw it in a coin jar. And we used to have a jar that just sat on the desk that had coins in it and if we were short a quarter, we'd just grab a quarter out of it and put it in there Again. We're talking small, miniscule amounts of money which, when you're dealing with a high volume of cash, especially if you're a bar that's dealing with thousands of dollars of cash moving back and forth with an eye, you're going to be a little over short here and there and again, as long as it's not a big deal, it's nothing to have to worry about. But having a change jar on your desk that you can move, you know, 10 cents a quarter back and forth between the drawer and the change jar works really really well to avoid a lot of hassle on the bookkeeping and accounting end. But again, if it's over definitely if it's over $5, that's a different story. That's not just moving back and forth through a change jar. That's something that needs to be investigated because it could be indicative of theft. It could be indicative of policies and procedures falling through. It's almost never just a mistake once you get in that five plus dollar range, and so it's just important to keep track of that.

Chris Schneider: 26:05

Hey there, bar owners, it's Chris Schneider, the bar business coach. Are you tired of the daily grind and ready to skyrocket your profits? I've got the solution. With my coaching and consulting services, we deep dive into menu management, team empowerment and business optimization Instead of slogging away in your business day in and day out, washing dishes, covering for employees and working 60 plus hours a week. Picture this A thriving business that runs like clockwork, whether you're there or not, letting you enjoy the successes that you've dreamed of. Let's make it happen. Visit barbusinesscoachcom to schedule your free 30-minute strategy session with me, or you can book a session just by clicking the link in the show notes below. Together, we will turn your business into a profit powerhouse, because at the Bar Business Coach, our only goal is to help you spend less time working in your bar and more time working on your bar.

Chris Schneider: 26:57

Now let's talk a little bit about cash safety, and when I say cash safety, I just mean good cash handling and making sure that you're not losing money. Because, again, one of the only real downside I see to cash is that it's instant transferability, makes it easy to steal and hard to track. So, part of cash safety always verify drawers. Always verify your petty cash. Count your safe counts, deposit counts, all that needs to be verified, and that means that every person that takes charge of a drawer should count their drawer, and now they're responsible for that amount of money. Your management should be counting the drawer before they hand it to the bartender, who counts it again. So we're double verifying those things. You need to verify that amount in petty cash, hopefully, ideally every shift, at least once a day. So if you have multiple managers working during a day, each manager should do that just as a way to ensure that the manager before them didn't make a mistake, because we all make mistakes and counting and recounting it takes a little bit of time, but it's never a bad thing. So make sure your managers are counting and recounting. Make sure your team is always counting their drawer. If you have someone on your team getting a drawer, they're counting it before their shift, always.

Chris Schneider: 28:24

Now, one of the other cash safety issues is counterfeit bills and counterfeit bills. I don't care what people come up with to protect bills from being counterfeited. It's going to happen. Now some countries the US, we're not one of them, but some countries have moved to polymer plastic banknotes that are actually really cool and waterproof and don't tear and are harder to counterfeit than what we use in the United States. But essentially, all cash can be counterfeited, so you need a way to check for counterfeits. What a lot of people use is the marking pens, and the marking pens are great because they will tell you whether or not the paper that you're marking assuming you're in the US is the actual paper it should be which is a linen-based paper, not a tree fiber or pulp-based paper. And those pens are made to not leave a mark on that type of paper paper, but leave a dark mark on pulp-based paper, which is great, except for one thing, and I will admit I got hit by this while I owned a bar. There are ways to. I have no clue how they do this. There are ways to actually wash that paper so that they get the printing off of it and then reprint a new bill on top of it.

Chris Schneider: 29:45

And so at one point I had some I think they were 20s. I had like four 20s that somebody had paid with. I took them to the bank to deposit them. The bank looked at them and they said dude, these are not $20 bills. And I said what do you mean? And held them up to the light and, as everyone that is in the United States knows, andrew Jackson's face is on a 20. But the watermark on them was Abraham Lincoln. So someone had taken $5 bills, washed them and reprinted them with a 20. That can happen. So just the pen alone is not good enough 20. That can happen. So just the pen alone is not good enough.

Chris Schneider: 30:23

Anything that's a 50 or a hundred and, frankly, 20s if you're not terribly busy. Hold them up to a light, look for the strip, look for the watermark. Make sure everything is how it should be, because the last thing you want to do is bring in counterfeit bills, because when you have a counterfeit bill there's not much you can do. It's, it's a casualty loss on your books and if you accepted dollars in in fake hundreds, you just lost 200 bucks. I mean, it just is what it is. So just using a pen is not enough. There are uv systems that you can get. There are all sorts of fancy cash uh security devices at it. There are all sorts of fancy devices you can buy to help you identify counterfeit cash from real cash. But just marking with a pen again not enough. Hold it up to the light, at least do that.

Chris Schneider: 31:15

The other thing with cash that you really need to watch is your voids and comps. So one of the oldest tricks in the book I will say when it comes to theft and stealing is to have a cash table, get the cash from that table and then void off their order or comp their order so that it's not going to appear in that server sales and they can just pocket that cash Because, as far as the POS system is concerned, that order never should have been paid for. So how do you get around that? Well, the first thing you do is you don't give everyone in your establishment the ability to cop and void orders. Ideally that's just a manager, but if you don't always have a manager on duty and you have key shift bartenders, that's going to be your key shift bartender is going to be the person with the ability to do that.

Chris Schneider: 32:04

Generally speaking, I have never seen a compelling reason nine times out of 10 that a server needs to have access to cops and voids. Again, that should be key shift bartenders, if you have to, and managers only and obviously as the owner you should have access too. Only and obviously as the owner you should have access to. But watch your voids and comps. And if you start to see disproportionate amounts of voids and comps on one employee, then you know that that employee may be stealing and that you need to investigate and figure out what's going on, because it's also possible they just give bad customer service. But the easiest way to steal cash and not have the POS system say that you owe it is through voids and cops, so watch those carefully.

Chris Schneider: 32:47

Another way that's very easy for people to steal cash is just by opening a drawer. So whether that's a no-sale button or using the key for the drawer to open it, both of those are going to open the drawer without there being money to go in the drawer and get around. You know the idea that the drawer only opens when money should go in and out and when a sale is in the computer. Now there are absolutely reasons that bartenders should have access to a no sale button, like if they have to get someone change. That's about it. If they have to get somebody change or you know, and that's if it could be a guest. It could be a server that needs change. They could just need change for this, but because you have a cash drawer, that's where your change is going to come from. There is a reason to have a no-sell button or a key. The key I would not give anyone access to. That's not a manager. Frankly, if you have a no-sell button, it's the better way to go, because that no-sale button, hopefully in your POS system and most of them do this nowadays. Hopefully that no-sale button is tracked and you can tell who hit it and when and therefore you don't have to worry about it as much. But keys to your cash drawer should be kept, ideally, in your safe so that only people with safe access have access to that key to open the door.

Chris Schneider: 34:05

Now, along those lines, if you see there's no sales, if you see something out of whack, you have to have some sort of proof. You have to investigate this. So you need cameras everywhere that cash handling happens, and that means you need a camera on your safe. You need a camera in your office where the money gets counted. You need a camera on your safe. You need a camera in your office where the money gets counted. You need a camera on your cash drawer where your bartenders are accessing.

Chris Schneider: 34:27

One thing that you should never, ever, ever, ever do unless you have conclusive proof, is to accuse someone of theft. The only way to have conclusive proof is to witness it happen or have a recording of it happening that you can line up with POS logs and with counts and different things to show that it did happen. So you need cameras everywhere that cache is involved, and if you have a drop safe that's in a different location than your office safe. You need a camera there too, but essentially it's worth the money. Anywhere where you have large amounts of cash, you need a way to view that cash. It doesn't have to be a networked camera, it doesn't have to. I mean you can use an old school camera plugged into a VCR machine, dvr and as long as you can wind it back and watch it, you're good. Obviously, most people nowadays we're using much higher tech camera systems they can be remotely viewed that are going to store that digitally in the cloud for a long time. But it's not a matter of what system you use or how technologically advanced that system is. It's a matter of having eyes on your cache that you can refer to anytime you want to.

Chris Schneider: 35:36

Cash safety is never loan your server a bank for their cash. And when I say a bank servers come in, they're going to have cash transactions. They need to be able to make change for those cash transactions so that they don't have to go to the bar and get change from the bartender. They should be bringing some cash with them for that and that sounds a little harsh, maybe, or a little ridiculous in some regards, because we're expecting them to bring cash to work, to use, to process cash for us, but when you start loaning banks out of your cash drawer, it just adds complexity, and anything that adds complexity to your cash management is going to make things more difficult and it's going to make it harder to maintain your cash controls and to make sure that there is no theft, there is no waste in the system, that cash isn't just getting lost. And what happened so with cash? Just to go over this again here real quickly, before we wrap up I love cash. I think the benefits far outweigh the issues. But in order to avoid issues with cash, you need cash management systems. You need forms that get filled out, reports that get filled out, you need to know where every penny is going in and out, you need to count your cash on a daily basis, you need to follow appropriate cash safety mechanisms and you just need to ensure that the cash you have, the cash you bring in, the cash that you should have, is what you actually have in reality. And with that, that'll about wrap us up for today.

Chris Schneider: 37:05

I hope you enjoyed today's insights. Make sure you like, subscribe and leave a review. Obviously, this podcast is growing. I love being able to interact with all of you every week, bringing on guests to offer outside insights as well, and so please like, subscribe, leave a review. That just helps us grow the channel and helps me deliver great information to even more bar owners.

Chris Schneider: 37:25

If you want to have more conversations with me, interact with a really cool group of bar owners, make sure that you join our Bar Business Nation Facebook group. It's a great place for building a community. People can talk back and forth, ask questions of each other. There's a lot of things going on there, and if you want to talk to me, whether it's about cash management or anything else directly related to your business, feel free to schedule a free 30-minute coaching strategy session with me and we can talk about ways we can collaborate and help you optimize your success in your financials and your business. And you'll find links for the Facebook group and the free coaching sessions in the show notes below. With that, guys, until next time, I hope you have a great day and we will talk again later.

Announcer: 38:14

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