Cash management isn't just taking up employee time. It's interrupting your store all day long.
How many times does a store manager deal with cash during a normal shift? We aren’t talking about customer transactions at the register. We mean everything that happens behind the scenes because there is cash in those registers.
A cashier needs smaller bills. Another register is running low on $5s. A new shift needs starting cash. Someone needs a $100 bill broken. A drawer needs to be pulled, cash needs to be counted, and eventually a deposit needs to be prepared.
Individually, these tasks don’t seem particularly significant. Most take only a few moments, which is one reason their impact can be easy to overlook. The problem is that they happen throughout the day, often require the attention of a manager or another authorized employee, and interrupt whatever that person was doing before the cash request came up.
Cash doesn't have to take hours to waste your time
Consider what happens when a manager is checking inventory and a cashier needs change. The inventory task stops while the manager accesses the cash, counts what is needed, and gets the cashier back to the register. Later, the manager may be working on scheduling when another register needs additional cash. Or the manager might be dealing with a customer issue when it’s time to prepare starting funds for the next shift.
The time spent on each request may be relatively small, but the operational impact isn’t limited to those minutes. Each request requires the manager to stop one task, deal with the cash issue, and then return to what they were doing.
That’s an important distinction when retailers think about the labor involved in cash management. Looking only at the total number of minutes employees spend counting or depositing cash misses the effect of having those tasks scattered throughout the workday.
Managers have employees to supervise, customers to assist, inventory to manage, vendors to work with, and store conditions to monitor. In many convenience and retail environments, they’re also stepping in wherever they’re needed. Repeated cash requests become one more thing competing for their attention.
Start-of-Shift cash is only the beginning
The store’s cash-management cycle begins before a cashier handles the first transaction of a shift. Registers need starting funds, which means someone has to access the store’s cash, prepare the appropriate denominations, and distribute those funds.
Once the shift begins, the store’s cash needs continue to change. Registers run short on certain denominations, large bills need to be broken, excess cash needs to be removed, and employees change shifts. Drawers eventually need to be counted and reconciled, and the cash collected throughout the day has to become a deposit.
Retailers have spent years looking for ways to make the deposit portion of this process more efficient. Smart safes can count and secure cash while reducing some of the work associated with deposit preparation. That’s valuable, but the deposit is only one point in the much longer cash-management process.
If the goal is to reduce the labor associated with cash, retailers also need to look at everything that happens before the deposit.
What if the cashier didn't have to call the manager?
Cash recycling changes the process because it allows retailers to automate more of the cash moving both into and out of the store operations.
With BANK IN A BOX, authorized employees can access everyday cash-management functions such as start-of-shift funds, additional register cash, bill breaking, and store deposits. Instead of requiring a manager to manually access and count cash every time one of those needs arises, the system handles the counting and creates a record of the transaction.
Employee permissions provide control over who can perform specific functions, while reporting gives management visibility into cash activity. The store maintains accountability without requiring a manager to personally handle every routine cash request.
For the employee, it means getting the cash they need to do their job. For the manager, it means fewer interruptions during a shift.
Keeping managers in the store
Some cash-management interruptions take a few minutes. A trip to the bank can take considerably longer.
When a manager leaves the store to make a deposit or pick up cash, the cost isn’t limited to mileage or drive time. For the duration of that trip, the store is operating without that manager on-site. They aren’t available to resolve a customer issue, answer an employee’s question, receive a vendor, monitor store conditions, or handle one of the countless unexpected situations that arise during a retail shift.
BANK IN A BOX allows store cash deposits to be handled without sending a manager to a bank branch. Cash deposited into the system can also be recycled to support the store’s ongoing cash needs, helping provide the denominations employees need for registers and other approved cash functions.
That changes the objective from simply making bank runs and deposits more efficient to reducing the need for them in the first place. The manager stays in the store, and cash already on-site can continue working for the business.
Look beyond the deposit
Retail cash management requires security and accountability, but neither requires every routine cash task to become a management task.
When retailers evaluate their cash-management processes, it can be tempting to focus on the most visible activities: How long does it take to count the cash? How long does it take to prepare a deposit? How much does it cost to get that deposit to the bank?
Those are important questions, but they don’t capture everything happening inside the store. Preparing starting funds, replenishing registers, breaking bills, counting cash, and responding to employee requests can create interruptions throughout every shift. Add trips to the bank, and the impact reaches well beyond the time required to count a deposit.
A better question may be: How many times does cash require someone to stop what they’re doing every day?
BANK IN A BOX helps automate the complete in-store cash cycle so employees can securely access the cash functions they need while managers spend more of their time doing what the business hired them to do: managing the store.
Give your managers more time to manage
If routine cash handling is consuming more of your managers’ day than you realize, it’s worth looking at the entire process rather than just the deposit. BANK IN A BOX can help reduce manual cash handling, simplify everyday store cash needs, and keep managers where they’re needed most.
