4 Focus Areas to Buy the “Right” Smart Safe for Your Retail Business

Cash management is always a concern for retail business, be it big-box retailers, specialty stores, restaurants, or movie theaters. In the absence of an effective cash management, your business can suffer from issues such as internal shrinkage, cash counting errors, burglary, and even counterfeit bills. A robust cash management, on the other hand, can beat these odd possibilities, mitigate cash-in-transit worries, and provide more time to cashiers to concentrate on core business issues. When considering to buy a smart safe you need to consider various factors. The blog discusses four focus areas that will help you buy the right smart safe to automate the cash management of your business. 

1. Cassette Capacity 

The amount of cash a safe can deposit in one go depends on its cassette capacity. The cassette capacity also affects the transaction speed of your business. Before buying a cash safe, analyze the denominations in which your business receives the bills. If you receive many small denomination notes, for instance, you may need to consider buying a smart safe with a high cassette capacity. 

2. Size

You need to purchase the right-sized safe for your business to ensure its optimal use. Purchasing a too large safe would mean a waste of resources, whereas, a too small safe would require you to frequently transfer money to the bank, which means spending more in armored services. 

3. Counterfeit Detection 

Ensure that the safe you purchase has counterfeit detection technology, to avoid incurring losses as a result of receiving fake bills. As far as choosing the counterfeit technologies is concerned, your options vary from counterfeit pens, UV light to watermark and magnetic ink detection. 

4. Bill Validator

Bill validators are available in two categories: single and bulk-note validator. Single-note bill validators are less expensive and offer a significantly lower jam rate than bulk-validators, which provide great uptime results. Bulk-bill validators, on the other hand, can stack up to 30 bills at a time, besides the fact that they accept bills almost 98 percent faster than single-bill validators. 

Conclusion

Considering the above four factors can significantly help in choosing a smart safe and rightly automate your cash management system. Whether you get in touch with a safe manufacturer in San Antonio or any other area, ensure that you check the smart safe has the features mentioned above. Simultaneously, always consider a professional money counting safe as even the best bill validators require regular maintenance. 

5 Ways CacheNET 5000 Streamlines Retail Cash Management

Technology is changing every passing day in every facet of life and business. It is now in the best interests of retail store owners to leverage state-of-the-art technology, such as commercial cash handling safes. Commercial safes not only streamline the cash management process within a store but also eliminates the risk of any human errors. This post highlights some of the advantages of CacheNET 5000, a heavy duty, back office solution for most cash-intensive businesses such as retail stores. It helps store owners streamline their business processes in a cost-efficient manner. 

1. Cash Collection and Management 

CacheNet 5000 collects and secures cash in an efficient manner. It eliminates the need for manual collection and calculation, thereby freeing up the workforce for better customer services. The safe comes with a smart locking system that reduces the risk of robberies, prevalent in the case of manual cash handling. 

2. Currency Validation 

The safe is powered with Cummins’ bill counting technology that allows it to differentiate between genuine and counterfeit bills. The high-capacity locking cassettes stores up to 5000 bills, reducing the need for frequent money transfer to the bank. The best part is that the cash is easily returned if the transaction is canceled, without exposing the rest of the cash to theft or other loss. 

3. Automated Accounting 

The safe offers an automated accounting solution regarding audit and report activity. Store managers often spend a large portion of their time maintaining the log book, managing employee payrolls and keeping track of other financial obligations of the company. The smart safe automatically generates receipts at every deposit making it easy for a manager to produce bills for every transaction at the time of the audit. 

4. Coin Collection 

Coin Collector is an optional component of the CacheNet 5000, which further improves the cash collection process. It can easily count and sort bulk coins, which are then stored in removable steel canisters by denomination for recycling and to easily pour them into bags for bank deposits. 

5. Reduced Cash Transit Cost

As the safe easily configures into one or two 2200 notes cassettes, the frequency of cash transportation to the bank gets reduced. This, in turn, reduces the transit cash cost of the vehicle that is used for the transportation. 

Wrapping up

In this digital and highly competitive world, the need of the hour for every business is to offer hassle free shopping experience to their customers. This is when commercial safes such as CashNET 5000 play a pivotal role in streamlining store’s overall cash handling process, freeing up the workforce to focus on client services. When purchasing cash dispensing safes, ensure that they are equipped with advanced features aligned with your business needs.

4 Factors to Consider When Buying a Smart Security Safe

Many cash intensive businesses are switching to smart security safes from their regular safes to reduce the losses arising due to lack of proper cash management, and to increase the productivity of their employees. Businesses that install security safes are not only able to recover the cost of installation in less than an year, but are also able to save a lot of money over and above their initial investment costs. If you run a cash intensive business and are looking to upgrade your existing cash management system or install a new cash management safe, here are the points you must consider when buying one.

1. User Interface

When purchasing a smart safe choose a safe with a durable and easy to access user interface. User interface is subject to extreme environments such as spills, scratches, impacts,and others. Therefore, it needs to be durable and robust to survive those conditions. Similarly, the user interface must be easy to access so that anybody accessing the smart safes does not need extensive training for using it.

2. Cost of Maintenance

Smart safe maintenance helps  prevent lockouts and keep the downtime as low as possible.It is, therefore recommended that businesses must go for periodic maintenance of their smart safes to avoid any complications that may hamper their operational efficinecy, and might also lead to customer dissatisfaction. Before finalizing a smart safe ensure to find out about the maintenance costs as these may vary from one safe to another.

3. Availability of Parts

Talk to more than a few smart safe manufacturers and vendors, to find out about the availability of spare parts of the safe you are planning to buy. It’s advisable to avoid safes with limited availability of spare parts or if their parts are exorbitantly priced; no matter how less they might cost you. Remember, limited availability of spare parts also means that businesses will have to face a substantial downtime, something that businesses with high volumes can’t even imagine.

4. Savings

Security safes help businesses save money in more than a few ways. For instance, they help reduce cash shrinkage, avoid counterfeit bills, reduce the number of armored car pickups, require a lesser number of employees for cash handling and many more such ways. When buying a cash safe you must check how efficient it is and what are the savings it can provide. For example, higher the counterfeit detection ratio of a smart safe, lesser the number of counterfeit notes that will pass through the system.

Conclusion

Though cost is one of the most important determinants when purchasing a smart safe, it should not deter you from buying a safe that best suits your business needs and fits all criteria mentioned in this blog. The reason is simple, your saving while using the security safe would be much more compared to any other safe that may not be the apt match for your business.  

3 Reasons Smart Safes Are Indispensable for Retail Stores

As customer management plays a key role in driving profitability, retailers always look for options that can free up their staff from less critical activities, such as counting coins and currencies, double checking transaction records, and like, to accentuate their focus on customer satisfaction. Cash management in itself is a mammoth task that requires a dedicated staff. When cash management is done manually, senior management members also need to chip in from time to time. To minimize the need of human intervention in cash management, an increasing number of retailers are turning to smart safes. Starting from accepting cash to validating, recording and storing bills, smart currency safes bring a number of capabilities to streamline the cash handling process in a business. Let’s take a look at three highlights.

1. Security

Various independent studies have revealed that five percent of annual revenue is lost to internal theft, and 80 percent of employees are more likely to steal if they deal with a manual cash handling process. In case of cash handling safes, there is improved accountability of every cashier on each shift and reduction in cash shrinkage, as everything is electronically controlled. 

2. Counterfeit Detection

Smart safes come with sophisticated bill verification systems that offer a failsafe solution to prevent the losses incurred due to counterfeit bills. Integrated with smart technology, these safes validate bills as soon as they are received from a customer. Trusted by banks to authoritatively validate notes, smart safes are a better alternative to UV lights and counterfeit detection pens.

3. Reduced Human Hours

Installing cash deposit safe helps staff and managers save time for collecting and counting cash and reconciling receipts with the point-of-sale system. In addition, smart safes maintain a perfect count of cash deposited, thereby saving time otherwise spent in cash till closeout process. In addition, by installing cash deposit safes, stores can bring down the hassles of transporting cash to the bank and also reduce the frequency of cash pick-ups by the armored-carrier services.

Conclusion

Despite the increasing adoption of electronic and plastic money, cash is far from being out of the equation, especially for retail businesses. Efficient cash management directly impacts the productivity of a business, thereby improving its profitability. Smart cash handling safes enable retailers to free up trapped cash, reduce costs, minimize losses, and get faster access to financial information. However, before putting your money in a smart safe, make sure you know that the safe is equipped with all the features required to ensure complete security of cash. Smart safes are available in varied sizes and specifications, and therefore, you might want to consult an expert when it comes to choosing a suitable option for your business.

3 Common Cash Management Mistakes to Avoid in Casinos

Efficient cash management is one of the challenging tasks, especially in a cash-intensive business like casino. Almost every day casinos are bustling with gamers who come to try their luck and splurge thousands of dollars. In order to be efficient in their operations, finance managers at casinos should implement the right cash management strategies. There are several common cash management practices in casinos that must be avoided to ensure efficient cash handling. Here are three cash management mistakes to avoid at casinos. 

1. Manual Counting 

Counting same bills twice just to ensure that there are no human errors is not only time-consuming but also labor-intensive. Incorporating smart safes instead, helps in collecting and counting money in an easy and hassle free way because these machines are error-proof. Though double counting is a good tactic when doing counting manually, however, using an advanced money counting safe reduces the chances of human error. Time saved can then be utilized to help employees focus on customer service and other tasks while ensuring accuracy. 

2. Keeping a Lot of Cash on Hand 

It is understood that casinos have to keep some cash on hand for big wins, but keeping a lot of cash at disposal leaves casinos vulnerable to misplaced money, internal theft, and shrinkage. To avoid any such risks, it is wise to make payments in check or a voucher if the winner wins more than the fixed storage limit. In addition, make deposits to bank on a regular basis so that you have less cash to manage and reduced risks of theft. 

3. Using an Obsolete Cash Management Solution

The market is rife with technologically advanced money counting safes that not only eliminate the risk of human error but also streamline the whole cash management process. Also, as casinos are the breeding ground for thieves, if you are using a traditional cash management system, it is time to replace it with an advanced money counting safe available on the market. Most importantly, the system should be equipped with counterfeit bill detector to reduce the risk of being scammed by tech-savvy scammers. 

The Bottomline 

There are many cash management solutions available on the market, but not every solution is right for every industry. When you are managing large amounts of cash on a daily basis, it is important that the system you use is equipped with current cash management strategies. In addition, by avoiding the three cash management mistakes discussed in this post, you will be more confident to make the cash management process in your business fast, efficient, and safe. 

5 Tips to Integrate Automated Cash Management in Hotels

Hotels have a large number of point-of-sale that are either fixed or mobile. All of these touch points receive a bulk of cash through endless transactions every day. If hotel managers and owners can automate their cash management at these points, they can enhance productivity, improve cash flow, and ultimately provide more time to their staff to concentrate on core business activities. However, there a few elements hotel managers need to consider to optimise their automated cash management systems. Here are five tips that will help them a lot in the long run. Take a look. 

1. Identify Weak Points

The first step you need to take as a hotel manager is to identify all those weak points for which you may need an automated cash management system. Are they increasing counterfeit bills, slow transactions during the peak hours, or some other issue? Analyzing these issues will help you in choosing an optimal automated cash management system. 

2. Prioritise the Transaction Points to be Automated

We understand that a business may not have enough capital all the time to install a smart safe or other cash management machine at all of their touch-points. Therefore, find out the weakest point and install the first automated cash management system there. 

3. Decide on the Type of Solution

There are endless number of automated cash management systems available in the market from smart safes to bill validators and currency counters. Ideally, as a business owner or manager you should look for a solution that can help in cash counting, detecting counterfeit bills, and also provide provisional credit. 

4. Train Your Employees

Installing a smart safe or other cash management machine is not going to help alone if your employees don’t have hands-on experience with the system. To ensure that you are able to take complete advantage of your investment, your employees should be trained to effectively use the machine. That’s why it is wise to look for a cash management provider that also provides training services on using their equipment. 

5. Monitor Progress Regularly

To ensure that the installed automated cash management system is delivering its desired results, it is essential to track certain business results. For instance, check how big an increase has there been in the operational efficiency of and inflow of cash in the business after installing the machine and if there are any areas that may need improvement. 

Conclusion

It isn’t uncommon to see hotel managers struggling with accurate cash counting and detecting counterfeit bills. Automated cash management systems can help them overcome these challenges. Simultaneously, an automated cash management system can streamline the entire operation and enhance productivity by simplifying cashier checkouts and eliminating internal shrinkage. 

Cash Dispensing Safes: A Wise Investment for Cash Intensive Businesses

USA’s first ATM, the first-of-its-kind cash dispensing machine, made its debut in the year 1969, and revolutionized the banking industry by eliminating the need for customers to visit the bank for withdrawing money. The use of cash dispensing feature, however, did not remain limited to ATMs, as soon the market witnessed the introduction of cash dispensing safes. These automated cash management solutions helped cash intensive retail businesses streamline their cash handling process and making it more secure and safe. On that note, we discuss a few reasons that make cash dispensing safes a beneficial proposition for cash intensive businesses.