PT THE AUDITOR


You Paid a Lot for That System–Why Not Use it?


might be a good idea to take a look at it one day. I found a very inter- esting thing: The system was keeping track of – at least printing out and/or storing – a ton of “exceptions.” Some- timesmore than 200 a day.


I These are items such as under-


rings, manual ticket transactions, gate-up alarms, low-ticket alarms, attendant card usages to let folks out of the garage, can- celed transactions, lost tickets, malfunc- tioning card readers and gates, change


ed by the system, and they are all ignored by the folks that are hired to collect the money, and by the ownerswho hire them. How do I know they are ignored? Simple, they don’t go away. Virtually all


KNOW A GARAGE that has a pretty complete ParkingAccess and Rev- enue Control System (PARCS), and I thought it


shortages at POF machines, and any adjustments made to the system’s cash reports. The PARC system also reports when the bank deposit differs from what the computer thinkswas collected that day. Notice anything about these excep-


tions? They all relate to the possible loss of money. They are all diligently report-


the issues listed above and others like them are management problems that could be dealt with and made sure they don’t happen again. Let’s take lost tickets, for example.


If there are 50 lost tickets a day out of, say, 500 tickets issued, that would be a 10%lost-ticket ratio. But let’s consider this for a


From 200 exceptions a day to fewer than five …


moment. Of all the times you have parked in a garage after pulling a ticket, how often have you lost your ticket? If you park five times a month and pay for parking, it would mean that you


would lose your ticket every other month. Can you even remember when you last lost a ticket? So how do you stop lost tickets? I


think it’s a process. You make the garage management go through extended hoops to deal with lost tickets.You have them collect a lot of data from each driver who loses a ticket (name, address, license number, etc., etc., etc.). You then have someone else confirm that the data are correct and that, in fact, the person did lose the ticket (call them up and ask). Who wants to go through all


that trouble? Certainly not the man- ager, the cashier, or the parker. Wouldn’t themanager do everything possible to prevent a lost ticket from occurring if rather than simply list- ing a number on a report, they had to fill out copious paperwork? Remember, a lost ticket is


potentially the loss of a full daily- rate cash collection. What about the use of an atten-


dant card to open a gate? It would seem to me to be the same issue.We need those cards to keep the garage running smoothly. But if it is run- ning smoothly, why should the cards be needed? If a reasonable explana- tion had to be given whenever an attendant card was used, I wonder if the frequency might go down. I tried an experiment. In this garage, they were averaging more


Continued on Page 44 42 JANUARY 2011 • PARKING TODAY • www.parkingtoday.com


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