CCTV Systems Help Manage Your Business

As CCTV systems move into the home market, many businesses are wondering if they still provide the best security and surveillance for their business uses. CCTV camera systems are still among the most economical and best tools to help small business owners manage their businesses and prevent loss. If you’re not sure whether a security camera and CCTV system could help your business, consider these points.

Shrinkage – the amount of your profit lost to theft – equals approximately 2% of retail sales, according to leading industry experts. That means if you’re doing $100,000 a month in retail sales, you’re losing about $2,000 a month of your inventory to theft.

The recession has caused a spike in theft, including employee theft. In 2009, the Centre for Retail Research noted that retail theft had risen around the world by an average of 5.5% -- but in North America, shrinkage rose 8.8% to its highest rate in history.

Shrinkage takes a $114.8 billion bite out of the world’s markets. That’s probably a lot less significant to you than the few thousand dollars a month you could be losing to employee theft, inefficiency, shoplifting and other preventable losses.

Despite the alarming rise in retail loss due to theft, as a whole the retail industry is spending less on security camera systems and other CCTV systems for security. A bit counter-intuitive, isn’t it?

A single CCTV camera can help you cut down or virtually eliminate a major source of retail loss – point of sale loss. There are many different ways that you can lose money at the point of sale, and many of them can be foiled by a security camera at the register. They include under-ringing, where clerks simply don’t scan everything in an order, usually for friends. While it may sound like a relatively small loss, industry experts estimate that it costs retailers between $8 and $10 billion a year. A CCTV system can let you keep your registers under surveillance, and if you make it known that sales are being recorded, a CCTV system serves as a deterrent as well.

A well-placed security camera can make it easier to catch shoplifters, but placing more than one CCTV camera to capture trouble spots from different angles can be more successful. Organized retail shoplifting is becoming more and more common, and a typical trick is for one person to block the view of the camera while a second person lifts the item. By having more than one angle on the most common trouble spots, you make it more difficult for a team to pull off their theft.

CCTV systems have fallen in price just as retail theft and shrinkage is rising. Don’t take a chance with your store’s bottom line. Invest in a good security surveillance system and watch it pay for itself.