Like many of you, when I owned and ran my stores, pawn shop security was a big priority. I did jewelry and gun counts several times a day.

The jewelry was locked in showcases and in my safe, I had security tags on my high-end general merchandise. I locked my store, used security bars and an alarm with video.

We all protect our stores in similar ways, but there is something that has always surprised me…

How many of you use the security levels built into PawnMaster?

We have 99 different security levels built in, and I can tell you, in my operation, a new sales and lending associate would start as a level 3 security with a strict loan dollar amount and sales discount top amount set in their employee profile in the software.

We’ve all been through those employees that take advantage of “easy” situations. The same things that make an employee good behind that counter (being an “opportunist”) are the same qualities that make them a risk for your business.

In my world, I chose to limit those “opportunities” and managed my stores by using the tools my pawn shop software offered.

You can limit the amount of money that can be loaned by an employee; for instance, any loan over $150 would require a manager to approve with a password or thumbprint, the same for sales discounts.

I would print the loans and sales for the day at the end of each day and walk the jewelry to the safe each night, and I would walk EVERY loan each morning to see what was loaned and why.

Our software has measures built in specifically for pawn shop security and limits what an employee can do. We have reports you can run that compare each employee to the entire store on all key performance indicators.

For example, if the entire store has a 78% redemption rate and one employee is below that, you can see what was loaned on and how much by that employee. This gives you the opportunity to find out if they just need training, or worse, perhaps they were “helping” a friend by intentionally loaning too much.

If an employee has a 90% redemption rate, they aren’t loaning enough, and again, you can report on loans and buys for just that employee.

Once you know this information, you can adjust the security settings for that employee quite easily, you can even limit the reports they are able to run.

Whether you’re an active PawnMaster user or not, pawn shop security should be among your top priorities, and not just in your physical store, but in your software as well. PawnMaster’s built in security levels make managing employee access easy, and the built-in reports give you invaluable insight into their behavior in your shop.