Other Articles on Restaurant Loss Management

A Systematic Approach To Loss Deterrence

Only Short-term Gains From Video Surveillance?

Most Owners Encourage Their Employees to Steal

The following is one of a series of methods servers or bartenders use the popular computerized Point of Sale (POS) systems to their advantage.  A popular restaurant had an employee who discovered a  profit leak that management hadn’t thought about.  This server would open a ticket for an order that included a soup and and a salad.  He would then give the customer a receipt to pay.  But the server would leave the ticket open.  When another customer came in, sat at a different table and ordered the same things, the server would then move the previously paid-for salad from the previous order/table to the new table, appearing to the POS system that it was a single order that was moved.

In this way, since the server could serve the salad and/or soup from a central prepared food area without creating a computer-generated preparation ticket, there was no record of the soup and salad he served, except for the first soup and salad served earlier in the shift.  In this way, the server often served and got paid for five to seven orders of soups and salads a night while leaving the one order ‘open.’

How did the manager spot the systematic server order-bashing?  The manager was routinely looking at salad and soup orders and noticed that two of the servers had below-average soup and salad orders.  

Then, by tracking both of those servers near the end of the shifts, the manager noticed these two had higher ‘table-moving’ activity than anyone else.  This curious behavior along with the fact that these two didn’t sell even an average amount of soup or salad caused the restaurant's management to investigate the two servers.  The Manager then watched the servers‘ video records and audited their receipts.  He noticed the servers serving salads and soups but the closed receipts didn’t show the menu items.

It turns out that this activity had been going on for some time and these two servers were helping themselves to hundreds of dollars a month in restaurant profits.  The happy ending was that the profit leak had been plugged and the Insight Commander is still on the job looking for other potential problems.

Brian McMillan is Director of Product Development of In Sight Commander System, Inc.  a software development company specializing in restaurants and video surveillance systems.  He can be reached at (714) 940-9800 or http://www.insightcommander.com/