Security Focus: Keeping an eye on the till

Rogue barstaff be warned: the eye in the sky is increasingly watchful.

Whether it's staff occasionally ringing through voids when they're actually giving their mate a cheeky free drink, or outright theft, statistics show the UK has made great strides in cracking down on dishonest practices. And it may all be down to emerging technology.

UK retailers, including pubs, experienced a 'shrinkage rate' - the amount of income inexplicably lost and attributable to fingers in the till or theft of stock - of 1.33 per cent in 2006, according to the most recent European Retail Theft Barometer from research body the Centre for Retail Research. Not bad for a country that the organisation found once had the highest shrinkage rate in Western Europe at 1.77 per cent in 2003.

One possible reason for this welcome development is gizmos that link CCTV to EPoS systems to keep an eye on till transactions. These are gaining prominence in our pubs and bars. Using the the system, an owner or bar manager can be alerted when an exceptional transaction - a 'refund', 'void' or 'no sale' - takes place. Then footage of the transaction in question taking place can easily be pulled from a camera trained on the till area.

DMA UK, responsible for marketing and selling a number of CCTV products in the UK, has run a trial of a till monitoring device in 150 pubs in the Regent Inns group. The technology is soon to be rolled out across the entire estate. With the DMA system, the camera actually sits in the till. Users have remote access to the footage, and the system can be programmed to send out alerts via email or text message when certain transactions take place.

"A bar owner can be sitting on a beach on holiday," says DMA sales rep Stuart Curtis. "They can be alerted, switch on their laptop and see exactly what's going on back home."This is an amazing piece of kit that's now becoming widely available for your pub. Money going missing from the till is one of the areas that pubs know create the biggest losses, and CCTV can improve the situation."

Panasonic has a similar system. Its 'Winics Retail' CCTV and EPoS system has been very popular since its launch two years ago. Panasonic stresses that CCTV is not just there to catch barstaff red-handed, but can be their friend too, pointing to instances where it has helped resolve disputes between staff and money-grabbing customers.