In retail, monitoring staff actions is one of the key conditions for preserving profit and preventing unauthorised activity. The mode for monitoring products cancelled from a sale is a specialised accounting program tool designed to track situations where a product was added to a receipt and then removed before the final payment was completed.
Business owners who want to maintain proper financial control most often have the following questions:
«How can I find out exactly what the salesperson removed from the receipt?»,
«Can the program prevent a cashier from cancelling a scanned product without authorisation?»,
«How can I verify the actual reason why the customer decided not to purchase the product?» and
«How can I prevent situations where the product has physically been given to the customer but is still shown in the program’s stock balance?».
To answer these questions in detail, let us examine how the most common violations work and the Torgsoft tools that can prevent them.
How does the product cancellation fraud scheme work?
In stores where customers are not always required to receive receipts, or where customers choose not to take them, dishonest salespeople may use a simple but effective scheme for personal gain.
The scheme works as follows: the salesperson scans the product, tells the customer the amount due, and receives cash. While the customer takes the product and leaves, the salesperson simply removes (cancels) all products from the open sales form. The program treats this as though the sale never took place, and the product is automatically returned to the virtual warehouse. The cashier keeps the money received from the customer. The greatest risk of this fraud is that the owner may discover the product shortage only during a full inventory count, when identifying the responsible employee is already extremely difficult.
How does Torgsoft help prohibit or monitor product removal?
In response to the common question from business owners, «Can a cashier be prohibited from removing products from a receipt?», Torgsoft offers two effective protection scenarios that can be configured by the owner.
1. Completely prohibiting the salesperson from removing products (supermarket workflow)
To provide maximum protection at the checkout, you can completely prevent the cashier from removing scanned items. To do this, activate the «The salesperson cannot remove products from a sale» option in the program settings (Settings - Parameters - Access). After this, the «Cancel» and «Cancel all» buttons will disappear from the sales form for an employee with the «Salesperson» role. If a product was scanned by mistake or the customer changed their mind, the salesperson will not be able to remove it from the receipt independently — an administrator or senior cashier will need to be called. This significantly increases control and prevents fraud involving product cancellations.
2. Monitoring and recording product removal
If your store’s operating model requires salespeople to remove products independently, you can enable strict recording of these actions. When the «Record the removal of products from a sale» option is enabled, the program will require confirmation every time an attempt is made to cancel a product. You can select one of the following recording methods:
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Entering a reason: the cashier must select a reason from the drop-down list or enter it manually, explaining why the product is being removed from the receipt, for example, «Incorrect size» or «Insufficient funds».
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Entering the responsible employee: removal is possible only after scanning the badge of the responsible employee (administrator).
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Entering the reason and responsible employee: the strictest combined control method.
In addition, the Torgsoft developers have provided protection against keyboard manipulation: during the procedure for removing a product from a sale, the program blocks the use of hotkeys, for example, F6 for quick payment. This prevents schemes in which the cashier could transfer a larger amount to the payment form before the products had actually been removed from the receipt.
Where can the owner check which products were cancelled?
To answer the question «How can I view the list of products removed by salespeople?», the program includes a dedicated report located in the Warehouse - Products Cancelled from Sales menu.
In this window, the owner or inventory manager can view detailed information about each cancellation:
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the exact time when the product was intended for sale;
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the product name and barcode;
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the quantity and price;
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the reason for cancellation;
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the salesperson’s name and accounting centre (store).
This report can easily be exported to Excel or printed for further analysis and internal investigations.
Important clarification: this function and the «Products Cancelled from Sales» report are available in the Ultra and Terminal versions. In the basic Torgsoft Start version, the setting for recording cancelled products has been removed because this licence does not provide access to the form for viewing cancelled products.
Additional tools for detecting fraud
In addition to monitoring cancellations in the current sale, business owners often face another type of fraud — fraudulent product returns. For example, a salesperson may use someone else’s badge to process a fictitious return for a product that was never actually brought back and then take cash from the cash register.
To detect such complex schemes, use the User Action Log (File - User Action Log). It records every operation performed in the program: who logged in, under whose password or badge, at what time they accessed the system, which receipts they issued, and most importantly — which documents they changed or deleted. Regular analysis of cancelled sales together with the action log helps you monitor cash transactions and detect attempts by employees to increase their income at the expense of your business.
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