From time to time, we get reports of how a trusted employee manages to find a new operations hole through which to exploit and gain personal benefit… usually cash.
Gift Certificates, for example, are commonly a target. Semi-recently, we received a report from a customer that found a CSR writing down the gift certificate numbers on slips of paper during their shift… then having a friend call in and order food for themselves using the same numbers.
In cases like this, it’s a head-scratcher on how to prevent such actions…. Obviously, CSR’s need access to gift certificate numbers as a function of the order taking process.
The most we can do is make public HOW trusted employees are getting smarter so that others can be more informed.
The most recent report on “improved employee stealthiness” to come in was actually from a larger RDS that had been struggling in the past 2 years to find out where in their model they had gone so wrong. Much of their business (like others) had dropped off because of the poor economy, but something just FELT wrong…
For months they were tearing their hair out because they couldn’t figure out how or where they were going wrong. By all their figuring, they should have been turning a steady profit in their model and operations, but for some reason the deposits being made into their bank accounts were barely (if at all) covering their operating costs.
Constant tweaking began on the model, the operations, the running of the show. New ways to save money, new ways to streamline operations… yet no matter how many improvements were made, they were barely covering costs.
This, of course, was assuming that everything was running as it should… and that all of the reporting generated was actually revealing the entire picture.
Finally… someone noticed a printed report from 2 months ago didn’t match a report being run for the SAME DATE from just last night. An Overall Summary report that was pulled out from a printed copy over 2 months ago showed a HIGHER series of totals than the one run for the SAME DATE the previous night.
When examining the two reports, it was immediately obvious via the order counts that there were TWO orders that were missing from the older report. This means that somewhere, two orders had managed to magically materialize between the the time period from 2 months ago to today.
From this fact, it didn’t take too long to find the “re-appearing” order numbers and look them up.
Using the “Order Journal” in the dispatch screen, it was discovered that the order was taken on the correct date… and it was completed/delivered during the same period. In addition, however, it was discovered that it was “undelivered” and “un-voided” by an employee that no longer existed for the company, and it was done so AFTER the driver had already checked out and reconciled with the manager.
More interestingly, the order was UNVOIDED by the employee just prior to running any restaurant statements.
Suddenly, the tone shifted from a faulty business model to one of employee theft.
Now suddenly the investigation shifted from one of “sloppy business model” to one of employee theft.
I’ll cut to the end, and tell you how the pieces fit together.
One of the managers, who had administrative access to the system, was keeping careful track of orders throughout the day that were LARGE enough to make it worth his while to steal, but still SMALL enough to be covered by the amount of cash collected during the day.
After he would check out all of the drivers, he would then go back and UNDELIVER (Shift-F6 in the dispatch screen) the order in DMS, then VOID the order in the system. (UNDELIVERING the order would help prevent the order from showing up in any of the other driver reports as well). He would do these actions while logged in as an old “re-activated” employee, to help over his tracks).
By doing this AFTER driver checkout, it would mean that the driver’s printed receipts would show the original order, but that any re-printed reports from the system would not. The driver is paid and reconciled, and the accounting staff has no knowledge otherwise, so unless the two are compared side-by-side, nothing becomes obvious.
Now… fast forward to restaurant payments. The RESTAURANTS (as everyone knows) keep tabs on the orders being paid… this is why the manager would UN-VOID the orders just prior to restaurant settlements being run, so that they would show up on the restaurant settlement statements.
This is what closed the gap so that restaurants would never call and complain about orders they never got paid for.
Drivers got paid…. restaurants got paid… and all of the reports that the RDS could run (when compared to each other from day-to-day) shows that everything balanced. Deposits would be made, and according to reporting, everything would balance… it’s just that the manager wound up pocketing the difference.
It’s only when a printed report surfaced from 2 months prior that the first signs of fraud was discovered.
Interestingly enough, the first move by the RDS wasn’t to draw any attention to any employee… instead, the first thing they did was change the combination on the drop-safe that contained the cash.
As soon as they did this, they were able to discover (thanks to the sloppiness of the thief) the “VOIDING” of the order, followed by the immediate “UNVOIDING” of the order when they discovered they could not longer open up the safe to immediately pull the cash out.
Once this hole was plugged, the details of the crime immediately began to unravel, and the thief was caught.
I won’t comment on the amount of money that was taken… only that it was done for over 2 years, and that the manager was able to pocket (on average) at least one larger order per day… in cash. A quick check with a calculator using your own numbers as a baseline would demonstrate your own exposure: what if your largest order disappeared… in cash… every single day for 2 years?
It again begs the question: who do you hire to guard Fort Knox?
