Second printer for reports?

[JF Mous]

Hi,

I just thought of something:
Ain't it possible to allow a second printer option to be set for reports.
For example: people may want to print their receipts on a receipt printer (let's say on LPT1), but it's quite possible they might want their reports printed on a 'normal' printer (e.g. LPT2).

Expecially useful for the closing receipt:
A very important rule is, at least where I work, that a cashier shouldn't be allowed access to his/her sales amounts before he/she has handed in the money.
If he (I'm tired of this he/she typing, so I'll just assume a male person from now on) has made a mistake and, for example, gave not enough or no change at all (not necessarily on purpose) to a customer, he would have too much money in the till at night.
However, if he closes out the register and the closing receipt is print on his receipt printer, he would know he has too much money and take the money out.

If the customer should notice and come back, you'd say to him you're sorry, but your accounts are in balance...

Summarized:
Giving your employees access to the closing receipts could result in fraud and unsatisfied customers.

This doesn't matter too much for my home business (because my only 'employee' is my wife and its she that spends my money anyways), but I'm sure it would matter for other set-ups.

[Dale Harris]

JF Mous,

I have thought about running two printers for various purposes but not for the purpose you are suggesting.

To prevent the problem of the people closing out from knowing what the register total is you can use the "Closing" password. This will prevent anyone without the password from actually closing out the register (function #2) or even being able to see the closing screen (function #1) Remember that the close screen has all the information that is on the closing receipt. Using the "close" password will require that someone with the password must be in the store when the register closes to actually close out the registers.

Now lets talk about employee honesty. If you were to read the all the posts on this forum and the email that I get you would assume that 99.2% of people hired to ring up sales are the absolute scum of the earth, and this is just not true. I have been hiring folks to ring up my register for 35 years and the vast majority of them are fine upstanding people.

However a small minority are not. A cash register is there to provide accountability for your people, among other things, but no register system is foolproof no matter how much you lock it down with PIN numbers, passwords, etc. And eventually you will have so many security measures in force that the register will be totally unusable unless a manager is standing next to it all the time. Your managers have nothing else better to do?

And this will still not stop theft. No register will stop you from just not ringing something up, or ringing a $5.00 item when the person is purchasing a $20.00 item. And there are many other ways. The point is that the register alone will not prevent theft no matter what you do with it.

One of the things I do is to make it easy for someone to steal from me. To use your example of taking cash overages out of the cash drawer, every once in a while I will put extra cash in the drawer to see if it is still there after the drawer has been counted. I will fake a register problem, take $150.00 out of the register, and tell the employee that the "cash in reg." figure is screwed up and there is no way to balance the register so not to worry about any cash shortage in the register. I will then see if there is more than $150.00 short.

I will do this after the new employee has been working for me for about a week and then again after about 4 to 6 weeks. How often do I catch someone? Practically never. From this point I can, you know, actually trust my new employee enough to be allowed to run the cash register without my standing behind her all the time. After all the vast majority of the people I hire a honest as are most people.