Ideally, effective employee management means helping your staff at your tanning salon do their best work every day in support of your business goals. The reality is, however, that sometimes employee management means addressing a darker aspect of employment— theft and fraud.
Employee Theft: A Big Problem for Small Businesses
According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, businesses lose an estimated 5 percent of annual revenue to employee fraud and abuse each year. Small businesses such as tanning salons with fewer than 150 employees are, unfortunately, the most likely to experience employee fraud and theft. These businesses are also more likely to experience significant or even catastrophic losses as a result of fraud, since they don’t have internal controls in place to counteract fraud.
How Fraud Happens at Salons
Billing fraud, in particular, represents about 20 percent of the theft at small businesses. In the context of a tanning salon, this might occur when an employee logs a transaction at a heavily discounted rate, charges the customer the usual rate, then pockets the difference. Business losses from theft can also involve employee theft of products.
An interesting twist in the narrative? The vast majority of employees (88 percent) who steal from small businesses try to cover their tracks. How do they do that? Most often, employees who attempt to hide fraud do so by either creating false documents and files or destroying or withholding real ones.
What can tanning salon owners do to reduce instances of fraud at their salons? Implementing a business software platform designed specifically for tanning salons, such as TanTrack, can do the trick.
TanTrack: Security Features Designed for Tanning Salons
TanTrack has developed a way for tanning salons to maintain more accurate records and features a variety of security measures that can give salon owners peace of mind. With TanTrack in place, salon owners can achieve better control and tracking of accounting documents, and effectively supervise and set limits on employee actions.
User Permissions
TanTrack allows you to specify which screens each employee can access. Any transaction executed by an employee is also tagged in the system with that employee’s unique ID code, making it easy to identify who may be engaging in fraud.
Maximum Discount Percentages
This business software platform for tanning salons also allows you to set discounts at a maximum percentage. This gives your team some wiggle room to bargain with customers, while ensuring that no employee can ever sell a service or product for little to nothing.
Online Booking
Customers can also schedule their own appointments online with TanTrack and pay for the service at the same time via a credit card. This reduces the opportunities for fraud at the cash register.
Fingerprint Scanners
This helpful hardware helps avoid time clock theft. For example, an employee running late calls ahead to have their friend clock them in early. With the fingerprint system enabled, this cannot be done.
Logging Employee Activity
In some areas where there’s a lot of valuable information at stake or a lot of money in play, TanTrack can log the activity of these behaviors and the employee I.D. so that if there’s ever a question of an employee doing unauthorized activity, it can be narrowed down and resolved at the source right away. Activities like this include deleting anything, upcharge overrides, and also some modifications, such as increasing number of sessions, etc. TanTrack will capture the information before the change, what it was changed to, the date and time, and the employee who made the change.
The system can also log attempted access into restricted areas. It logs which employee I.D. was used, what screen they attempted to access, and whether or not the access was successful.
All of this tracked activity can help you better understand the regular and expected behaviors of your employees so you can easily identify when something is off and put a pin in it.
TanTrack also comes with bookkeeping features, extensive reporting, and inventory management, allowing you to better track payments, product count, and more.
Talk with the TanTrack Sales Team today to learn more about our security features or request a full demo of TanTrack to discover how it can transform employee management at your salon!
