Jasmine works for Noah's Ark Veterinary Clinic as a receptionist. She also assists with some of the animal care duties. The clinic is located in a large town and mainly services families and their domesticated pets such as dogs, cats and birds, occasionally they see a more exotic pet like a snake or an injured native animal. Part of Jasmine's duties includes processing a variety of financial transactions using the workplace's point-of-sale terminal. At the end of the day, Jasmine is required to reconcile the point-of-sale terminal to ensure that the EFTPOS receipts and cash amounts balance against transaction details.
What types of sales transactions do you commonly process in your workplace?
Most payments are made using EFTPOS, however, some clients do pay in cash especially for smaller retail items and occasionally a direct debit arrangement is set up for the payment of large transactions.
What are some of the issues you commonly encounter when processing a point-of-sale terminal?
Connection issues between the terminal, the EFTPOS machine and the bank occur from time-to-time. Often it just means that the connection is slow which holds up the transaction temporarily, but sometimes it is down completely and we cannot process EFTPOS transactions during this time.
Sometimes a client's card is declined, usually due to them having insufficient funds in their account. This can be quite embarrassing for them so diplomacy is required on my part. If they are unable to pay by another method then we will sometimes set up a payment plan although this is not the preferred option, especially if they have already shown they may not be able to pay the invoice.
I have to replace the receipt paper-roll every few days, this is not difficult but can be annoying if it runs out in the middle of a busy transactional time.
What policies and procedures does your workplace have relating to point-of-sale terminal reconciliation?
I have a few Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) related to basic operation of the equipment and the reconciliation process. When I first started in this role I had to refer to these procedures quite a lot, but now I know how to do everything and I rarely have to refer to them. Sometimes I will update the procedures if our processes change slightly, you never know when they might be required for a new staff member and they must be kept relevant.
What sort of discrepancies do you encounter when undertaking reconciliation?
Mainly minor discrepancies between what the Point of Sale report says I should have in the cash drawer and what is actually there. This is usually because I have accidentally provided incorrect change to a customer or taken too much money. It has only occurred twice, thankfully, and the amounts were very small. I had to use $5 of my own money once to make up the difference.
Have you had any cash security incidents at your workplace?
Not personally no, we don't actually have much cash on hand as most customers pay using EFTPOS. However, a colleague of mine who used to work in a pet store said that she was once the victim of an armed robbery. It was pretty scary for her.
Our boss also had to fire a staff member a few years ago for stealing. Apparently the staff member was deliberately miscounting the day's takings and skimming money off the total every evening. It took nearly two weeks before it was noticed. Now we have a strict cash security policy in place and I have to verify the takings with my supervisor prior to putting them in the safe.