Office Supplies: Stopping Employee Theft!

It may start off as simply as taking home a pencil or pen tucked into a shirt pocket or dropped into a purse by accident. Maybe it's a box of highlighters and a binder for a child's school project. But employee theft of office supplies costs companies over fifty billion dollars each and every year and affects everyone, from the honest employee to the manager to the salesperson to the consumer who ends up paying higher costs overall. And far from being a victimless crime, the theft of office supplies has been found to be a major factor in many business bankruptcies!

But where do you start in dealing with employee theft of office supplies without seeming to be petty or a vindictive employer? Follow these tips below and you'll find your costs decreasing in having to replace and purchase new office supplies almost instantly.

First, make it clear to your employees that office supplies are supposed to be only for the office and not for personal or home use. True, a box of pencils or erasers might each only cost a few dollars but if ten or twenty or a hundred employees help themselves to these office supplies you'll find your accounting department spending far more than you had estimated. It doesn't have to be just pens and pencils, office supplies include the paper needed to run the copy machine; binders and notebooks that all add up quickly when employees help themselves to the office supply cupboard without restraint. Estimates range from one third to one half of all business bankruptcies having some sort of employee theft as a main cause, and stealing office supplies ranks highly in these studies.

Establish a tracking system for your office supplies in order to see where they're going and at what rate they're being used. It may be as simple as asking your staff to sign a clipboard each time they take a box of pencils out of the office supply cabinet. Or as complicated as having a lock placed on the cupboard and a specific employee assigned to track and sign out boxes of office supplies when needed. This may seem excessive, but the cost can be substantial over time when you find out how many office supplies are disappearing without valid cause.