Preventing Fraud, Part III

At the last Blackbaud Conference, one client shared an experience where several cashiers had defrauded her organization via a pretty clever scheme. For cash transactions, the cashier would sell a Member or Child ticket in PE but charge the patron a Full Price admission and then pocket the difference. Once Jeff Heffner and I heard the story, we decided to come up with some reporting ideas to help catch a thief in the act.

After some brainstorming, we created the Cashier Audit Report. It displays a breakdown of price types sold by each user and their relative percent of total. With it, you can look for trends and see if anything weird is going on with the distribution of price types. For example, you could see that four of your cashiers sell Student tickets as about 8% of their total sales, but the fifth cashier is selling 15% of his tickets as Student. It could be completely innocent, or it could be that he is letting his friends in at a discount or taking money. Either way, you now have the information you need to take action at your fingertips.

Alyssa Wigton, our report writer in Professional Services, provided a couple of great tips and helped us get it working in PECRViewer.exe so it can be run directly from Patron Edge. To use it:

1. Download this set of files: Cashier Audit.zip2. Add the stored procedure to your PE database
3. Add the report into Patron Edge per Knowledgebase solution BB142029As with any custom stuff I give out on the blog, this isn’t an official piece of Patron Edge. My analysts can’t take questions on it, and I can’t be responsible if it leaves the bathroom light on, tramples your flowers, or rearranges the numbers on your speed dial!

Did you find this report helpful for preventing fraud? Are there any other reports in the system that you use on a regular basis to look out for thieves? Leave a note in the comments.