Safe Keeping

To reduce shrink, increase cash flow, standardize processes and liberate store managers from time-consuming banking chores, two restaurant chains have implemented an innovative and easy-to-use automated cash management system integrated within an in-store safe. But, they say, the Dunbar Cash Manager Safe’s greatest benefit has been increased employee and customer safety.

“In a business like ours, a pretty good amount of cash changes hands day to day,” says Alan Brankamp, director of internal auditing for Cincinnati-based Frisch’s Restaurants, operator of 127 Golden Corral and Big Boy restaurants. “Anytime you bring cash into the equation, you have to think about the safety of folks. That was a major driver for us in selecting this system.”

Travis Smith, chief financial officer for Bodan, also cites the “huge risk” associated with managers “taking a bag to the bank and making a deposit every day. We wanted to take that risk out of the equation.”

Keeping cashiers accountable
Frisch’s locations have average weekly sales ranging from $25,000 to $80,000, with 40 to 70 percent of sales in cash. Bodan, which operates 14 franchised Wendy’s restaurants from its headquarters in Boulder, Colo., averages about 65 percent cash transactions.

Before installing the Dunbar Cash Manager Safe program, store managers at both companies spent about two hours daily counting cash, filling out deposit slips, driving to and from a bank, waiting on line for a teller and then waiting as the teller counted the cash deposit.

“A manager’s primary job,” Brankamp says, “is to take care of customers, but the old system took our managers off the floor … and when a manager is away, anything can happen.”

The upgraded Cash Manager Safe was released earlier this year by Hunt Valley, Md.-based Dunbar Armored, and has a number of advanced technology features including Cash-Aware, a reliable wireless digital communication system that is an upgrade from Dunbar’s dial-up credit application.

The software in the safe works like a vending machine: As cashiers receive cash, they feed the bills into the safe. The software reads the denominations and keeps track of the tallies.

“The safe knows the tally by individual cashiers,” Brankamp says. “It takes the administrative aspect out of cash management.”

Making cashiers more accountable has helped reduce cash shortages, Smith says. “Now no one touches the cash in the drawer except the cashiers.”

Because the cashiers don’t know how much cash has been “fed” into the system until the end of their shift, “it takes away a lot of their ability to game the system,” Brankamp says. Instances of cash shortages at Frisch’s have declined, and that savings is paying for about 10 percent of the cost of the program, he says.

Smith says that over the past 12 months, shortages at Bodan decreased by about $25,000.

Increasing cash flow
The dollar value of the cash deposited in a Cash Manager Safe is transmitted by modem daily from the safe to a secure server and, from there, to a chain’s banking partner. Without that program, Smith says, “we would have had a sizeable hole in our cash flow.”

Frisch’s “depends on cash flow to run our business,” Brankamp says. “In the past, sometimes managers did not make it to the bank before it closed ... With this system, every store’s Cash Manager Safe makes the deposit at the end of the day.”

The system has helped Frisch’s reduce its banking fees. “It’s costly for banks when someone comes in and has to deal face to face with a teller,” says Brankamp, who estimates that savings on fees “covered 25 to 30 percent of the cost of this program.”

To date, more than 37 chains are using the upgraded Cash Manager Safe system in more than 500 locations. Over the course of the next 12 months, Dunbar projects growth of about 200 installed units per month. Bodan, which began rolling the system out more than 18 months ago, has it in all stores; Frisch’s has it in 21 high-volume stores, and plans to add 20 more stores before the end of the year.

Frisch’s management chose the Dunbar Cash Manager Safe because “it does everything we need and is very simple to use,” Brankamp says. “We had it installed and people trained to run it in a matter of hours.”

Because of both the hard and soft savings created by the system, Frisch’s has already covered half the costs of its investment and Smith says that the Bodan system essentially has been paying for itself from day one. What’s more: “Our managers loved it right off the bat,” Smith says. “It took a lot of risk out of their hands and it kept them in the restaurants more, allowing them to be in control of their store more.”

Frisch’s managers also love the system, says Brankamp. “From our perspective, we could have the best product in world, but if our managers didn’t like it, it wouldn’t do us any good. They all love it.”