Chapter Eleven Paperwork & Controls Your Franchise Operations Manual 87 The Paperwork and Controls will provide you with a wealth of information about your Half-Priced Granite franchise when completed timely and properly. Since the Paperwork and Controls provide you with critical operational information, you are required to use them properly. This requirement will help to establish a professional business attitude in the operation of your Half-Priced Granite franchise. It will also assure that an accurate and verifiable historical profile is compiled for your franchise. Many of these reports will come from your Company approved systems. You must make sure that your system will generate all the reports required for your own internal controls and all the reports required by your Franchise Agreement and this Operations Manual. ACCOUNT DESCRIPTIONS The Account Descriptions must be set up using the Company approved POS system and software. The Company will provide you with specific Account ID codes, Account Descriptions and Account Types. This detailed information is covered in depth in the Half-Priced Granite Franchisee Training Program. These codes and descriptions will be used in any and all reports the Company feels is necessary to provide a complete and accurate picture of your accounting records. Accounting codes are subject to change at any time and the Company will provide you with those details as they are released. ACCOUNTING/PAPERWORK Your Company approved software will generate the following reports: Sales reports, Client reports, and Inventory reports. These reports are covered in more detail in your Half-Priced Granite Franchisee Training Program. ACCOUNTING REQUIREMENTS Your franchise agreement requires, in Article 9, that you report your Gross Sales to Half-Priced Granite or at such other times as may be established by us. You are required to submit written or electronic weekly summaries showing results of your operations. Other requirements for reporting are also outline in Article 9 of the franchise agreement. Be familiar with them and make sure your reports are accurate and timely. HalfPriced Granite or its representative can review your books and records from time to time. Reports will be generated using the Company approved POS system. The following lists some reports that you can expect to maintain. More reports will be covered in detailed during the franchisee training program. Deposits For security reasons, make deposits to the bank during daylight hours. Vary the timing of the bank deposits and the route taken to avoid an obvious pattern that might be monitored by a potential robber. Before money is deposited into the safe, place it in an envelope. The employee is to record the date, the amount of the deposit, the time the deposit was made, and his initials on the outside of the envelope. This same information is recorded onto this section of the Control Sheet as the deposits are made. Make deposits more frequently during peak sales periods. Immediate deposits should also be made whenever a $50, or larger, bill is received as well as whenever a gift certificate is received. Record these deposits in the same manner as your regular deposits. If you must make more than one deposit in an hour, simply disregard the numbers in the Deposits column, record your deposit in the next available space, and note the actual time of the deposit in the Time column. For security reasons, deposits must be made throughout the day even if the deposits are very small. If only a small amount of money has been taken in since the last deposit, instruct employees to make a deposit anyway. This helps employees to form a habit of making regular deposits. 88 Review the deposits daily to look for large quantities of money being deposited and long lapses of time when no deposits are made. Large, infrequent deposits could indicate that an excess amount of cash is being kept in the register. Should this occur, instruct your staff to make corrections accordingly. Handling Cash At all times, keep only a minimal amount of cash on hand. Keep all bills facing up and the heads in the same direction to organize the drawer and help to avoid errors in the change-making procedure. When receiving payment from a customer, place the money received on the top of the drawer until change has been made and counted back into the hand of the customer. This way the customer cannot claim to have paid with a larger bill than actually presented. Inventory In order to run your business efficiently, you must know how much product is used and how much that product costs. The Company's system for carefully analyzing inventory and calculating costs on a bi-monthly basis provides you with the opportunity to maintain tight control in this area of operation. This procedure is very important because it assists you in identifying items, which may be contributing to high costs. Since inventory is done on a bi-monthly basis, you will be aware of any cost problems as they occur. Inventory forms and paperwork will be discussed more fully during your initial Franchise Training Program. Attached you will find the Company approved Inventory Sheet, Commission Structure and Log as well as our Company Mileage Log Sheet. THE INVENTORY WORKSHEET Inventory is a required control procedure that must be completed at the end of each month. The Inventory Worksheet is used for recording the appropriate unit of measurement for each item that is inventoried at the end of the week. These reports will be discussed in detail during the Half-Priced Granite franchisee training program. 89