Document Management – Cash Management System
// January 29th, 2010 // Uncategorized
A client of mine is involved in gaming and retail, essentially a ‘club’ where patrons engage in gaming (poker machine) and eateries. They turn over a decent amount of revenue per day which they need to then capture in an excel spreadsheet and physically track the money with a large vault where they store all cash. Revenue is generated by:
Gambling machines
Point of Sale Systems (Eateries, Drinks etc)
Post Office
Gym
and cashiers are responsible for their own monies from the time they are handed money to the end of their shifts when they empty their POS systems. Naturally, like any retail business, there are variances between the POS system and the physical cash amount brought in, which need to be tracked. These are recorded in a list in Sharepoint.
At the beginning of each day, the cash supervisor will create a new spreadsheet (Cash Sheet) which will be used to capture all revenue. He/she will create this new spreadsheet using a content type created which is attached to the physical Microsoft Excel Sheet. He/she will then save this document and check it back into Sharepoint. Documents in this case must be checked out since all changes are then captured within multiple versions of the documents, each version having capability to be rolled back to.
At the end of each shift, cash supervisors then count the cash and do a reconciliation. They then record their findings in the “Cash Sheet”. This requires checking out the document, making changes, saving and checking back in the document. This is repeated 3 times during the day, until finally all shifts are completed.
At the end of the final shift, the cash supervisor then locks the document down, using a “Lock Document” workflow. In this Sharepoint workflow, the permissions are automatically applied by Sharepoint such that all users only have “read-only” access to the documents. This prevents changes to the document once the document has been “locked”.
Below is an image of the dashboard used:
This solved a number of different issues for the business. Some of these are listed below:
- Manual processes that are time consuming and non-value adding
- Increased opportunity for errors due to manual keying and re-keying of data
- Data redundancy as information is entered multiple times on each spreadsheet
- A lack of audit and tracking control:
- system is open to „massaging? of data
- no locking down of daily takes – open to fraud
- spreadsheets are open for editing across all users
- Lack of accountability on variances as there is no current reporting on variance by
person by time
- System does not enforce follow up on variances
