Dealing With Pilferage In Your Spa Or Salon

Pilferage could possibly be impacting your spa or salon’s bottom line in a big way. The bad news is that pilferage is largely invisible as staff and customers can get creative when they want to steal from your spa or salon. Here are a few examples of how pilferage often occurs, and ideas on how to mitigate these.

- Sudheer Koneru

Monitor your retail products:

As with any spa or salon, you probably display and sell retail products. To avoid theft, ensure your POS tracks product sales and provides a report that lists each sale. If you do not have software that automatically tracks how much retail product you are selling, then track this information in a spreadsheet. You should then conduct regular audits, where you physically count each retail product and ensure this matches with your expected numbers.

Backbar inventory controls:

When it comes to those products that you use for your services, it is difficult to differentiate between outright theft and wastage. Therefore, implement a control system that projects product usage. Here’s how it works:

Know what and how you have purchased.

Identify how much of each product should be used for each service. For example, a hair wash might require two pumps of shampoo and two pumps of conditioner.

Use your POS to track how many services you sold over a period of time.