smarttill® Solution Cash Shrinkage
Reduced by 99% at Gainfort Ltd.

smarttill® to the Rescue

Gainfort’s owner asked around for another integrator and was referred to MSP Systems Ltd in Dunstable. “He was given our number by a satisfied customer,” says MSP Systems Sales Director Greg Dockery.

Dockery introduced Lahal to MSP’s EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale) cashier system, which integrates with apg’s smarttill® intelligent cash drawer solution. MSP Systems has been an apg® partner for three years and made smarttill® “an essential part of the MSP sales toolbox.”

smarttill® captures data in real-time from the till, updating and reconciling cash balances with every purchase. It eradicates spot checks, minimizes cash mistakes at the POS, and eliminates the need for cash reconciliation at the close of business.

Once introduced to smarttill®, Lahal made a quick decision to install two drawers at each Gainfort location. “The installation was very quick. Engineers came out and installed and set up everything,” he says.

Value and Quality

From MSP Systems’ perspective, smarttill® delivers a perfect combination of value
and quality to round out its POS solutions. “When you have a good retailer who
uses the POS properly to run their store, having the smart drawer as an add-on
takes our system to another level,” says Dockery.

For Lahal, the smarttill® deployment makes life easier. Cash shrinkage is a thing of
the past.

Gainfort Ltd., a family-owned business for over ten years, operates two Nisa
Local convenience stores in Cambridgeshire, UK. At the end of employee
shifts, owner Sunil Lahal noticed a disturbing trend during cash counts: The
totals were off.

“We were using a manual system of counting the cash at the end of each shift
and, tallying up sales against the amount of cash that should have been taken,
there were always issues with mistakes by some staff members,” Lahal says.

Not wanting to jump to conclusions, Lahal gave his employees the benefit of
the doubt that honest mistakes were causing the discrepancies. But he couldn’t
tell for sure. “When mistakes were made, it took too long of a process to trace
them. They were difficult to pinpoint.”

There had to be a better way. He started looking at automated cash systems
to replace the manual process of counting bills and coins. Lahal contacted his
POS integrator for a solution but didn’t get very far. The integrator didn’t seem
able – or willing – to deliver what he needed. “I didn’t feel they were pulling
in the same direction as myself in modernizing and embracing smart systems.”

Time Savings and Accuracy

Dockery says Gainfort’s owner had two primary goals for implementing smarttill® – eliminate cash discrepancies and save time on cash counts. Lahal says it was taking 10 to 15 minutes several times a day at each store to reconcile cash – twice as long when mistakes occurred.

Now, thanks to the smarttill®, he can cash up in a few minutes, and he doesn’t have to wait until the end of a shift. As soon as a discrepancy occurs, smarttill® issues an alert so it can be immediately addressed. “We can narrow down mistakes to the minute when they happen and check CCTV at the exact time when they took place to see what has happened,” he says.

The functionality benefits both the company and the employees. When cashiers make a genuine mistake, “they can correct it immediately or let us know to solve the error. This has resulted in a reduction of cash shrinkage of 99% at both stores,” Lahal says. “Since installing the systems across both shops, we caught three members of staff for theft and have prosecuted one as we had sufficient and accurate evidence to obtain a prosecution.”