lar value from the face of the gift certificate. The SKU’s are not electronically tied to a dollar value. This is a limitation of the previous POS system that was not addressed during the testing stage of the new system. Therefore, the error rate is very high and discrepancies in gift certificate sales are common. At the close of the shift, an electronic cashier report is generated on the register that just shows a total dollar amount tied to a SKU. This electronic cashier report is returned to the cash room along with the receipts and the hand-written cash audit report.Problems in Store Level Sales AuditWhen the cash audit report comes back to the office with the bag of receipts and the electronic cashier report, calculations are performed on the manual cash audit report to identify the amount of gift certificates sold. This is compared to the electronic cashier report. If there are discrepancies, sales audit clerks are required to use the electronic cashier report as the “correct” report for auditing purposes. The dollar amount of the gift certificates sold is recorded on a monthly gift certificate log and a new running monthly balance is calculated. Any new gift certificates received from the corporate office are recorded on another log and the acknowledgement of receipt (from inside the book) is signed by a member of management and returned to corporate accounting. At the end of the month, records of gift certificate receipts (disbursements from corporate), records of gift certificate sales, and other accounting records are forwarded to corporate accounting for verification after an attempt on the store level for reconciliation.Problems in Corporate AccountingStore managers are responsible for calling and authorizing a book of gift certificates to be dispersed for their store. When this occurs, the gift certificates are retrieved from the vault, the book number is logged, and the dollar value of the book...
