CLCR Feature Final

DRIVING EFFICIENCY IN RESTAURANTS:

The Case for Closed Loop Cash Automation

Restaurants need efficiency more than ever.

The restaurant business has always been a challenging proposition. Battling constantly with labour costs, shrinkage, and fierce competition – it’s never been an industry for the faint of heart. Post-pandemic, the macro-economic situation has changed, and priorities have had to shift with it. Inflation has pushed up the cost of ingredients, services and labour; energy costs and rent increases have compressed margins further; and the labour shortage sparked by lockdowns hasn’t really abated.

Now is the time...

So efficiency and productivity are always top of mind.

However, when restaurant owners search for links in the operational chain that can be optimised, there’s one area that often gets overlooked – their cash processes. Often just accepted as a cost of doing business, manual cash handling costs staff and owners countless amounts of time and energy, and is often one of the most stressful aspects of the day. But we are in living in a new era of automation. Modern digital solutions can remove the strain of these processes, and bring a world of other benefits to restaurant operations.

Let’s talk about Closed Loop Cash Automation, and how your staff may never have to touch cash again.

What is Closed Loop Cash Automation, and how does it work?

Customers pay their cash directly into the POS cash recycler, whether at an order-pay kiosk or at a staffed till. The cash is authenticated, counted, and change dispensed, without a staff member ever having to touch it.

Here, the back-office cash recycler reconciles all of the cash takings, ready for end-of-day, and can also refill cassettes with the right denominations to go back to the recycler or prepare deposits for CIT or the bank.

The cash is sorted into sealed cassettes. Once full, staff members simply remove the cassette and take it into the back office.

Can Closed Loop Cash Automation really transform restaurant operations?

Closed Loop Cash Recycling may look like a solution to one problem: cash handling costs.

Let’s look at 5 key ways that Closed Loop Cash can transform restaurant operations.

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Costs

Controlling labour costs is a constant challenge in restaurants. But imagine if reconciliation at start-of-day, end-of-day, and shift handover could be done at the touch of a button. How much time would you save every day, every week, every year? How much time do you staff spend trying to find discrepancies and resolve them? How much time would your managers save if all of your cash was already counted and organised for deposit?

Cash handling is time-heavy. And time is money. Many restaurants also find that their need for CIT services or time spent taking deposits to the bank are greatly reduced, as cash is more efficiently recycled within the business. And that efficiency can be even further improved when the data created by cash recycling solutions is harnessed to deliver insights about the entire cash position of a restaurant, or across a whole enterprise.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

With all of that time reclaimed from cash handling, you are also free to reallocate your staff to higher value tasks – such as focusing on your customers and their needs, or maintaining the restaurant environment.

HYGEINE

Another area that is vital for restaurants is hygiene. Many restaurants have to deal with changing gloves or washing hands constantly in between handling cash and working with the food (or deal with unhappy customers if they forget).

SECURITY

You’d be hard pressed to find a restaurant that hasn’t suffered from cash shrinkage, whether from human error or internal theft. It can be a sensitive topic, but shrinkage is a problem that affects up to 95% all businesses, and it hurts everyone (business owners, employees, customers). It eats into profits, it drives wages down and it pushes prices up. In fact, research from the National Restaurant Association revealed that QSRs lose up to 7% of sales to employee theft.

But beyond the direct loss of profits, the threat of shrinkage has wider negative effects. It can create an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust, encourage micromanagement from employers, and lead to poor staff relations. Glory’s cash recycling solutions don’t act as surveillance on your employees – they remove the temptation of theft altogether, because staff no longer have contact with the cash as it moves through your business. On top of that, errors are virtually eliminated, as well as the risk of accepting counterfeit notes.

STAFF RETENTION

Staff retention has long been a challenge for restaurants. Turnover is higher than most industries, and that costs time and energy every year in finding new workers and training them to a high standard. Today, the labour shortage is making this more of a challenge than ever. So how can restaurant owners keep more of their staff for longer? Obviously, a good employee experience is at the heart of it. There are many factors that come into it such as wages and company culture (sorry, we can’t help with those), but lowering stress levels in the workplace can go a long way.

Dealing with cash is often one of the most stressful parts of a restaurant worker's day. If you could simlply remove the burden of tasks such as reconciling cash drawers and resolving errors, would it be valuable? Would it lead to greater job satisfaction? Our case studies across hospitality and retail demonstrate that workers love these systems, because they remove all of the pressure involved in processing cash, and allow them to get home quicker at the end of the day.

But it’s much more than that.

Its impact ripples through a business, delivering positive change and increasing profitability across a wide range of areas.

75% of employees admit to having stolen from their employer at least once

U.S. Chamber of Commerce

“The Glory machine really changed the life of my staff because they get more comfortable with the customer. They take better care of them without having to look at the cash and change while making a conversation.” Philippe Rispoli, Owner and Chef, PB Boulangerie Bistro

Not only can you improve the customer experience by making your staff more available, but you can also cut service time and eliminate payment and change errors.

Costs

Security

Hygeine

Customer Experience

Staff Retention

Leisure and hospitality has the biggest shortage of workers, down 349,000 people, or 2% of the total pre-pandemic workforce.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

A one-star increase in a restaurant’s Yelp rating correlates with a 5-9% increase in revenue.

Michael Luca, Harvard Business School

“The biggest benefit for me is that at the end of the day I don’t need to worry that the cash amounts are correct. I don’t need to rely on staff to count the cash at the end of the day. They can clear down the store and go.” Francisco Oliveira, Owner, Santa Nata

75% of consumers will not visit or patronize a restaurant with negative reviews about its cleanliness.

Harris Poll for Cintas Corporation

“Glory’s CI-Hybrid 15 payment station along with Acrelec’s K27 self-service kiosk has been a gamechanger for us. This solution helped us improve the customer experience and increased our sales by offering a better speed of service. It’s also more hygienic as staff aren’t touching the cash anymore.” Karim Zigheche, Managing Director, BIM’S

What’s holding restaurants back?

The GLORY Closed Loop Cash SOLUTION

The research shows that cash isn’t going anywhere – the challenge is to make it as efficient as possible. Glory’s Closed Loop Cash solutions can dramatically lower the cost of cash, while giving you time and flexibility to deploy your resources across higher value areas of your business, and creating a better environment for both staff and customers alike.

Learn more about our full range of solutions here

Cash remains a vital and popular payment method for much of the population, particularly in the quick-service industry.

If you still aren’t sure if this investment is right for you, have a chat with our team to get a clear picture of the impact and ROI you can expect from implementing Closed Loop Cash in your restaurants.

With a Closed Loop Cash system in place, workers never have to touch cash again – making your operation simpler, cleaner, and more appealing to customers.

Reason 1

Reason 2

Reason 3

Which brings us to the final reason: cost.

For many restaurant owners, it’s the up-front investment that turns them away from cash automation. And it is an investment, but we can demonstrate it is a solid one.

The second reason is that this is just the way they’ve always done things.

The time and energy involved in manual cash handling is baked in – a cost of doing business. But this cost is far higher than it needs to be when technology can remove that burden.

The first reason they don’t implement cash automation, is they simply haven’t heard of it.

Banks have been automating their cash processes for decades, and in recent years retailers have started seeing the benefits too, but restaurants have largely gone under the radar.

Click icons to learn more

K27

ORDER-PAY kiosk

The K27 is designed to deliver if you’re short on space or you want maximum self-service capacity. Cash, card and mobile payment options mean your customers will benefit, however they choose to pay.

CI-100X

BACK-OFFICE Cash Recycler

The CI-100X accelerates back-office processes and reconciliation, enabling a multitude of flexible operational processes to be implemented.

POS Cash Recycler

CI-10X

The CI-10X cash recycling solution removes the need for staff to handle cash at the point-of-sale and increases speed of service.

UBIQULAR

Cloud-based business intelligence and reportinG

Maximise the ROI on your cash automation solutions and fully optimise your cash processes by turning the data they produce into actionable insights at the device, restaurant and enterprise levels.

Glory’s range of cash automation and order-pay solutions are the most comprehensive on the market.

No restaurant owner wants to exclude a significant number of customers from their business.

Or further explore Glory’s full spectrum of cash automation and insights solutions, and all of the ways we can drive efficiency in your business.

We believe it’s time for restaurants to learn about the transformative power of cash automation.

Would you go back to washing clothes by hand? Or mowing the grass? Then why would you continue processing cash manually, when the technology is there to do it for you?

When you look at the ROI for our customers, and their testimonies that they would never go back to manual cash handling again, we think you will see that the broad range of benefits and cost cutting our solutions deliver will far outweigh your investment.