I have a really bad feeling that I had employee's stealing from one of our restaurants by writing up sales tickets, acquiring the money and then never officially ringing the sale up in the POS. I found several of these that didn't reconcile to the POS and other logs from the closing manager. From 2016 to 2017 we had a 15% loss in sales but only 5% difference in COG. COG % to income averaged 29% in past years and in 2017, it was 32%. I am trying to prove that this is a legitimate loss to my insurance company but I need some sort of documentation that if I calculate the 2017 COG by what the prior years average cost was that we should have actually made $33,128 in sales for the year. Any help would be appreciated.
Determining theft
Answers
Understand your frustration, but one data point is that you may incur more than $33128 in expenses to prove that you lost $33128 (or at least a big chunk of the "stolen sales"), so is the juice worth the squeeze?
Also will a claim cause your business insurance premiums to rise?
Stacy,
Interpreting your question your COGS have went up and you have a fear that there might be a theft by writing up sales tickets.
Q1 - Did you check the inventory adjustment as of December 31, 2017? Inventory adjustment may reduce or even increase at times this difference? Inventory option is only viable to check if you have been adjusting your inventory for food and liquor in past years as well.
Q2. - What POS do you use? Most of the POS have VOID reports for the day/week/month/period. You may want to check VOID and Discounts provided by your restaurant manager in your absence. Depending on your POS configuration, you should also be able to get some VOID reports for a specific time of the day (may be a time when you're not present at the restaurant)
Q3. - Revenue per server hours in the pick time is a good analysis to catch this kind of calculations as well.
Q4. - VOID analysis by employee ID is also a good option to check.
These are the questions you need to answer and check to see the possibility of theft. Sometimes increase in inventory is also a reason for increase in COGS, if you are not doing the inventory adjustments at the period end.
I have been working for Restaurant Accounting and KPI reporting for such issues since last more than 10 years.
If you need any further help or information, you can contact me on [email protected].
There are many information that you can grab from your POS and analyse into right way to understand what's going on?
1
There are such operational KPI reports for Restaurants and BARs that you should be reviewing for your restaurants on regular basis to catch any of such unusual difference real time.
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Risk Management