The number everyone underestimates
Start with the smallest version of the problem: someone takes £10 a day from one till. Not a raid — a single under-rung meal, one fake void. On a counter taking £1,000+ a day it's statistically invisible, and as we've shown elsewhere, the till still balances.
Why theft hurts more than a bad month
Here's the part that the "only a tenner" framing misses completely: stolen cash comes out of profit, not revenue. When sales dip £100, you also didn't buy the food, so you lose only the margin. When £100 is taken from the till, you already paid for the food, the staff, the rent and the electricity that earned it. The whole £100 is yours — was yours.
That's why the honest way to price a till leak is in sales equivalent: how much extra business would you have to win to earn the stolen amount back? At a typical takeaway net margin of around 5%, every stolen pound needs about twenty pounds of sales to replace it.
A £10-a-day leak, priced in sales — hypothetical, 5% net margin
The bars are to scale — that's the point. £3,650 of stolen cash and £73,000 of sales are the same amount of profit. Nobody would shrug at losing £73,000 of orders; the till leak is the same event wearing a smaller number.
The full table, so you can find your row
| Daily leak | Per year, per till | Sales to replace it (5% margin) | Sales to replace it (10% margin) |
|---|---|---|---|
| £5 / day | £1,825 | £36,500 | £18,250 |
| £10 / day | £3,650 | £73,000 | £36,500 |
| £20 / day | £7,300 | £146,000 | £73,000 |
| £40 / day | £14,600 | £292,000 | £146,000 |
Margins vary shop to shop — pick your column. And if you run several sites, multiply by however many counters you can't personally stand behind. This is why multi-site operators feel "soft takings" without ever finding a cause: a modest leak at two of five sites reads, from head height, exactly like a slow quarter.
What the industry numbers say
Our worked example is deliberately conservative. The US National Restaurant Association's much-cited estimate puts employee theft at around 4% of sales in food businesses, with quick-service running higher.* On a takeaway turning over £8,500 a week, 4% would be roughly £17,700 a year — nearly five times our £10-a-day example. You don't need to believe the headline figure applies to your shop; even a quarter of it is a serious number, and the honest answer for most owners is that they don't know, because the reports they check can't show it.
The cost of the usual responses
Doing nothing costs whatever your row in the table says, every year, compounding with staff turnover as habits get passed along. Watching the cameras yourself is free and never happens — a week of shifts is 70+ hours of footage, and you have a business to run. Standing at the counter more works exactly as long as you're standing there, and only at one site.
TillGuard exists because none of those actually resolve the question. It cross-checks what the till recorded against what happened at the counter, across every site, and sends you the handful of moments worth a look — each with a short clip. At £75 a month per site, it costs less than a £4-a-day leak — the smallest row on the table above — and the first quarter is free, so the arithmetic gets to prove itself before you pay anything.
One site, one quarter, free — see what it finds
Set up in under an hour with the cameras and till you already have. Each month we go through every flagged moment together, clip by clip. If it finds nothing, you've bought certainty. If it finds something, it's paid for itself for years.
Book a trial site on WhatsAppFirst five sites: three months free, founding rate locked for life · No long-term contract