Although good quick-service employees are essential components for a successful restaurant operation, certain individuals in the ranks are more than willing to steal from the cash register or give discounts to their friends.

In the past managers had to rely on cumbersome videotape or their own instincts in order to catch employee-thieves—if they were caught at all. Now, with the advent of digital video recorders and advanced computer systems, stopping cash shrink at the POS is a lot more effective.

For managers looking for high-tech surveillance capability, the primary trend in quick-serve security is a system that connects the POS system to a series of video cameras in the store. Actions taken on the POS can be programmed to trigger a computer connected to the system to save the videotape of what is transpiring at the checkout counter.

StarSat LLC, which focuses on reducing cash and product shrink using this technology, can install the entire system in a restaurant from scratch.

Vice President of Operations for StarSat, Jim Sexton, says that 16 cameras will typically cover the entire building—food preparation area, POS, drive-thru, back door, etc. A specially-configured PC is then hooked up to all of the cameras so that any activity that happens in the restaurant finds its way to the computer’s hard drive.

StarSat can then set up certain conditions with its clients based on how the client wants to monitor what happens at the cash register. If an owner-operator wants to track all manager discounts that exceed five dollars, the computer can do that, Sexton says. Each action, like a manager discount or a senior citizen discount, is given a rank on a zero-to-nine scale based on what the client wants. Level nine incidents present the biggest threat of theft and are allotted the most amount of video capture time.

These events, regardless of ranking level, are all recorded locally on the computer’s hard drive. Events at the zero, one, or two levels aren’t kept on the hard drive for an extended period of time, but the hard drive can hold two to four weeks of video, Sexton says.

The PC is also connected to the internet so store managers can access the video from other locations. Area managers are able to access the StarSat data for any store in their jurisdiction. Furthermore, StarSat basically has a limitless video storage capacity at their central offices.

The unique aspect of StarSat’s service is that they also provide a monitoring service. StarSat employees watch all of the video from the store. “We try to put the video in front of managers that they only need to see. Our people look at every event at every store every day,” Sexton says. Managers typically end up watching about 15 minutes of videos. StarSat’s trained video-watchers are responsible for tracking 50 stores each.

A store without cameras that needs wiring will need to pay $6,000 to $7,000 for StarSat to install everything, plus the monitoring fee. So what does the store owner or management get in return?

“We’ve been able to track return on investment closely. The net return on investment has been eight to ten months. In a million-dollar fast-food operation, we are seeing return of $11,000 per store per year,” Sexton says.