Every year, retailers, businesses has to conduct an annual audit and inventory check of all their merchandise on hand. To ensure that whatever inventory information they have in their computer system are accurate, to know if they have excess inventories or there has been losses, and more often there are alot of losses due to pilferage, wrong encoding of quantities of stocks, typographical error in inputs sometime in the past several months.
Its a tedious process, more often being done manually. I have worked for a major footwear brand in the past that after conducting the inventories, we discovered a huge discrepancy in the quantity indicated by our system as against the actual stocks on hand of each stores and after carefully reviewing inventories, deliveries, actual counts, we conducted a thorough investigation on the matter.
I have to personally review input data, financial data, stock records and when I couldn't seem to actually find any probable explanation, I decided to look into our importation records, bill of lading yet still did not significantly gave me an answer, so I have to request records of all past cash register receipts from the accounting department. A tedious, prolonged hours of checking, auditing, analyzing the receipts, Lo and behold, I got my answer, there were several transactions that does not match the actual record.
I was curious why the receipts has shown several transactions that have suspicious void cash transactions, yet several credit card transactions and later also being voided. This made me delve deeper into the matter and requested top management to do reassignments of staffs, Previous cashiers and store managers has to be transferred to other outlet stores, the old sales staff has to learn cash registering, I hired new staffs to fill the vacancy due to the "promotion" of previous sales and inventory staffs.
I have to observe the behavioral pattern amongst those I have to move to other stores, especially the store managers and the cashiers, and whenever I frequently visit them on a regular basis, gets to hear some complaints of their reassignments, ranting their dissatisfaction and grievances. They not having a single clue that the very person who had them reassigned was me.
I have to pacify, explain managements decision was for their benefit of future promotions to be area managers, I have to come up with several valid reasoning to show them that their job movement was for their benefit in the long run.
And those that complaint the most, gets my attention and after the investigation was over in 3 months, I found out that those who have shown grievance over their area reassignment were involved in a unilateral intent to defraud the company of stocks, even cash from the coffer of their store sales.
After going through all the due process that I have requested HR to conduct, and the admittance of three of the co-conspirators to defraud the company and pinpointing each and every store managers and cashiers involved, the company filed criminal charges against the accused, for which summing it up, in 4 years, we had been defrauded of over 5 million pesos, in inventory pilferage and cash pilferage.
So bottom line, the saying that its always an insider most often holds true, and to be complacent and too trusting in delegating tasks does not mean well at times. Though this experience and instance may be a case-in study for us, I have to make new changes in merchandising, inventory management policies within the company to avoid the same from happening. I also have to institute new policies on rewarding best employees, honest staffs, gave a lot of "carrot on stick" benefits to operational staffs and management.
Its a tedious process, more often being done manually. I have worked for a major footwear brand in the past that after conducting the inventories, we discovered a huge discrepancy in the quantity indicated by our system as against the actual stocks on hand of each stores and after carefully reviewing inventories, deliveries, actual counts, we conducted a thorough investigation on the matter.
I have to personally review input data, financial data, stock records and when I couldn't seem to actually find any probable explanation, I decided to look into our importation records, bill of lading yet still did not significantly gave me an answer, so I have to request records of all past cash register receipts from the accounting department. A tedious, prolonged hours of checking, auditing, analyzing the receipts, Lo and behold, I got my answer, there were several transactions that does not match the actual record.
I was curious why the receipts has shown several transactions that have suspicious void cash transactions, yet several credit card transactions and later also being voided. This made me delve deeper into the matter and requested top management to do reassignments of staffs, Previous cashiers and store managers has to be transferred to other outlet stores, the old sales staff has to learn cash registering, I hired new staffs to fill the vacancy due to the "promotion" of previous sales and inventory staffs.
I have to observe the behavioral pattern amongst those I have to move to other stores, especially the store managers and the cashiers, and whenever I frequently visit them on a regular basis, gets to hear some complaints of their reassignments, ranting their dissatisfaction and grievances. They not having a single clue that the very person who had them reassigned was me.
I have to pacify, explain managements decision was for their benefit of future promotions to be area managers, I have to come up with several valid reasoning to show them that their job movement was for their benefit in the long run.
And those that complaint the most, gets my attention and after the investigation was over in 3 months, I found out that those who have shown grievance over their area reassignment were involved in a unilateral intent to defraud the company of stocks, even cash from the coffer of their store sales.
After going through all the due process that I have requested HR to conduct, and the admittance of three of the co-conspirators to defraud the company and pinpointing each and every store managers and cashiers involved, the company filed criminal charges against the accused, for which summing it up, in 4 years, we had been defrauded of over 5 million pesos, in inventory pilferage and cash pilferage.
So bottom line, the saying that its always an insider most often holds true, and to be complacent and too trusting in delegating tasks does not mean well at times. Though this experience and instance may be a case-in study for us, I have to make new changes in merchandising, inventory management policies within the company to avoid the same from happening. I also have to institute new policies on rewarding best employees, honest staffs, gave a lot of "carrot on stick" benefits to operational staffs and management.
