Upgrading our business’s safe / vault was daunting. We spent many months
researching and trying various products because we wanted to reduce our
insurance costs and save our managers time in managing the safe and safe access.
Hopefully, this article will provide you with some lessons learned from our safe
buying experience.
First, estimate about how much cash you intend to store in the safe during
business hours and during non business hours. Then, check with your insurance
company regarding the type of safe they require to insurance the contents of the
safe. For example, if you intend to store over $10,000 in cash, your insurance
company require a safe with a certain rating.
Safes are rated by the thickness of steel of the safe walls, burglar resistance,
and fire resistance. Some common safe standards are B rated safes, C rate safes,
TL 15, TL TR 30. TL or TR means that the safe is burglar tool resistant for
either 15 minutes or 30 minutes. Keep in mind that this assumes that the burglar
is a pro – it would take most burglars considerably longer to break into these
safe.
One major issue that we were concerned about was how to track how much cash was
taken out of the safe and how much cash was put back into the safe. A safe time
lock will only tell you when a safe door was open, NOT what was taken out or put
into the safe. To allow us to accurately track cash going in and out of the
safe, we decided to look at smart safes.
The smart safe helped us automate our cash handling, eliminate employee theft
and freed our manager from being a traffic cop for the safe. At the start of a
teller or cashier shift, the smart safe dispenses money to a cashier or teller
based on permissions set by the manager. At the end of a shift, the smart safe
counts the cash from the teller or cashier, automatically deposits the cash into
the safe and reconciles the amount of cash dispensed and counted against the POS
data.
Some smart safes will allow a manager to log into the safe from a remote
location and dispense or count cash to tellers or cashiers at another location.
Note that not all smart safes have these features, ask the provider specifically
if the safe can dispense money, count money, and whether the safe can be
controlled remotely.
The providers of smart safes include
Alpha Cash Safe, De La Rue and Wincor Nixdorf. We choose the product from
www.alphacashsafe.com because it was the only product that dispensed cash,
counted cash and could be controlled remotely by our managers. It also cost a
lot less than the other products which are targeted more towards banks rather
than retail.
| | Author Info:
Alex Saferan works in retail loss prevention. |
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