Question

If you were a cashier and your job requires that you immediately enter each sale when it occurs. Recently, lunch hour traffic has increased and the assistant manager asks you to avoid delays by taking customers’ cash and making change without entering sales. The assistant manager says she will add up cash and enter sales after lunch. She says that, in this way, customers will be happy and the register record will always match the cash amount when the manager arrives at three o’clock.

The advantage to the process proposed by the assistant manager includes improved customer service, fewer delays, and less work for you. The disadvantage is that the assistant manager could steal cash by simply recording less sales than the cash received and then pocketing the excess cash.

Propose and evaluate two courses of action you might consider, and explain why these two courses of action would be useful in dealing with this situation.

Answer 1

The two courses of action that I will consider here are:

1. The first course of action that I will consider is to immediately contact your manager and inform him of the situation at hand. There is a high probability that the assistant manager might embezzle some cash by not entering sales on a real time basis. You can apprise your manager of the situation at hand and discuss some of the internal control measures that can be put in place or that can be augmented from the current levels so as to ensure that the assistant manager is not able to embezzle and misappropriate any cash.
2. The second course of action that I will consider is to straightaway reject the assistant manager’s proposal and instead insist on entering sales on a real time basis. This will ensure that the process is being done as per the operational framework and that there is no deviation that will lead to undue financial and operational risk for the business.