Electronic payments are gaining steam, but cash remains essential to day-to-day retail operations. A study from the ATM Industry Association found that there is approximately $1.48 trillion of currency in circulation behind cash transactions. Retailers working to secure their future increasingly need to develop strategies to manage cash securely and cost efficiently in light of the more complex payment environments they're facing.
Contemporary technologies offer retailers new opportunities to change how they handle cash, giving them the opportunity to turn a fixed cost into a variable expense that lets them optimize value and safeguard their future. This begins by securing cash effectively - not just in the traditional sense of keeping it in a safe - and extends out to how currency makes its way from your store to the bank.
Reconsidering Cash Security
Securing cash is about much more than security. The average shrink rate for retailers in 2015 was 1.38%, meaning the retail industry as a whole lost $45.2 billion. This shrinkage can be extremely damaging, and traditional cash management processes can't keep your finances safe. Smart safes provide an opportunity to innovate here, letting you track when employees interact with the safe, monitor cash flow in real time and gain complete visibility into your cash assets.
The transparency into cash and user activities lets you secure funds from the point of sale to the safe, protecting your assets in more intuitive ways that eliminate loss and add an essential layer of security to your operations. From there, you can use the visibility into the state of your cash assets to improve operational efficiency and reduce the costs associated with managing cash.
From Security to Efficiency
Protecting your future isn't just about avoiding cash losses due to employee theft. It's also a matter of updating and modernizing your cash management processes to ensure the cash that you do handle doesn't bog you down. For many retailers, cash management represents a fixed expense. At the end of each day, you recount your cash income and check the figures against transaction data. Every couple of days, you get the funds from your safe to the bank, often depending on a worker to carry thousands of dollars down the street to your local branch.
Besides the inherent risk in this process, it also means you're taking a lot of time to simply process funds and deliver to the bank. You can use an armored car service to alleviate risk, but then your costs go up if you have a daily or every-other-day pickup schedule.
Smart safes change all of this. They track the income in real time and integrate with systems at your bank so your financial services partner knows how much money you have available at a given time. You can also integrate with an armored car service provider, allowing them to only come to pick up cash when you need it. This eliminates the risk of loss almost entirely and it shifts your costs.
Since you only pay for automated transit when you need it, you ensure your expenses for cash management fluctuate based on the cash you're taking in. At the same time, visibility between your safes and your banks lets you get provisional credit to generate more flexibility.
Rethinking Cash Management
Smart safes and associated services lay the groundwork for a groundbreaking approach to cash management. In today's climate, cash may make up 40 percent of your transactions one week and 20 percent another. With a smart safe, your costs can shift relative to that income, maximizing the value of cash within your business and positioning you to drive efficiency gains.
Superior can help you drive this value, giving you access to support and services that fuel sustained innovation in retail cash management.
