Stolen or Sold?

When an item leaves your store, it’s not always because a customer bought it. The right technology gives you the means to know for sure.

Theft is an ongoing convenience store concern. While video cameras, bright lights, security systems, and good old fashioned vigilance ease the problem, these solutions don’t go deep enough. You need to access a consistent and detailed look at inventory movement. What your books say you have on hand often differs from reality.

Of course, taking the time to go over your item sales with a fine tooth comb and manually comparing that record to what’s left on the shelves isn’t practical—especially if you’re counting around $100,000 worth of merchandise—but it is the best way to determine whether an item was stolen or sold.

Fortunately, advances in technology, such as the products and services provided by SSCS, have made it easier to take a granular, itemized look at inventory movement across the sites in your enterprise, especially when the tools are frequently and rigorously used.

Our company’s flagship back office system, the Computerized Daily Book (CDB) incorporates an ongoing record of POS activity to make book versus physical inventory comparisons easy. Our handheld inventory scanning solution gives you the mobility needed to get items into the inventory database wherever they need to be scanned in the store, and our Transaction Analysis (TA) web-reporting application provides a way to call out suspicious activity such as excessive voids, refunds, and no sales.

Our technology’s assistance in the meticulous tracking of inventory also leads to auxiliary benefits like identifying hot sellers, slow movers, and overstock. And you’ll also have a historical record of merchandise performance over time to help identify store sales trends.

A mass of inventory records taken as a whole can seem like a monolith of data that discourages close inspection, but the right tools can help you get past that forbidding appearance and get down inside the data where you find the nitty-gritty of what’s really happening in your store and on your shelves.

If you would like assistance in getting control over your inventory, locating suspicious activity, and knowing just what it is you sold, please give us a call at 1-800-972-7727.