Control of cash transactions or how we became friends with David Yan

David Yang, founder of ABBYY

IT business does not always begin with the development of software. Yes, many on napkins in restaurants write ideas for a future startup, someone is washing their open source project at night, somewhere right now in the garage with a soldering iron on a raspberry pi they are creating a new smart home. But sometimes the IT business grows out of traditional, conservative entrepreneurship (where they buy condensed milk cars and then change them for the composition of paper clips). In such conditions it is difficult to imagine how the team of effective managers will be complemented by the development team.

A vivid example of a classic business that has grown into a large IT project is in the biography of David Yang. Everyone knows David as co-founder of ABBYY. Some people remember that he had a hand in creating the first-ever pocket communicator Cybiko. Since 2004, the restaurant business has emerged in his life, from which a large IT product has grown - a solution for iiko restaurant business automation, which has gone beyond the small cafe opened by David Jan and very quickly entered the top 3 of the Russian market.
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And what have Ivideon, you ask?

Very simple. In January 2017, while everyone was resting, the Ivideon team integrated with the iiko solution and launched a joint product ...

IT business from scratch: David Yang goes to automation

According to David Yang, romantics and adventurers are starting a company, and they make the company skill ball and real pragmatists a long-term business capable of saying no. Yang himself ranks as romantics - there is no contradiction. Since 1989 in the IT business, he has not stopped at one ABBYY.

ABBYY’s story has been told many times, but little is known about David’s restaurant business. It all started with gatherings with friends, when 70 people per 70 square meters came to the founder of ABBYY (history is silent about what the neighbors thought about this). So there was an idea that you need a place where it would be easy to get together with friends.

The idea grew into the opening of the FAQ-cafe in Gazetny Pereulok, then the cafés and restaurants ArteFAQ, Defaqto, “Sisters Grimm” appeared - not the number of friends grew dramatically, but the new business began to bring profit. And Yan did not take on the usual role of an investor with a bag of money. He attended bartender courses, worked as a waiter, chef, manager — imbued with the features and requirements of a new market.

David began to study software used in restaurants and cafes. At that time, a large zoo of restaurant automation systems was introduced to the market, but they all did not correspond to the entrepreneur's ideas about how convenient and efficient software should look.

At the same time, a colleague from ABBYY introduced him to the founder of IT consulting GlowByte (manufacturer of solutions for business intelligence and data warehousing) Maxim Nalsky. Maxim dedicated all his life to B2B products, including Pyrus for organizing workflows, designed to replace the use of email in a corporate environment, and FinGrad for managing financial reporting.

David and Maxim decided to create an integrated system that combines all the processes in the restaurant: cashier, online sales, warehouse, salaries, personnel management, relationships with suppliers, guests, etc. Previously throughout the software market, all restaurant automation processes interacted poorly with each other, inheriting the worst features of the software from the 90s: they were too simple and not complex.

So the efforts of two people appeared iiko company: instant information, knowledge & operations. It took another three years to create a product capable of covering all aspects of the restaurant’s activity in a convenient and understandable form.

The cost of full automation (including hardware, hardware, computers, training, implementation, license) from iiko was comparable in cost to any other automation system. But the fact is that iiko gives the restaurateur several times more and allows you to scale business, see finances, warehouse and relations with your employees in online mode - this allows you to earn more money, better serve guests.

Before the introduction of iiko, in the FAQ-café, as a standard, they received about 20% of the profits for distribution, having a turnover of around 2.5–3 million rubles a month. But after the introduction of iiko, several bartenders quit, several cooks changed, and profits actually doubled due to a reduction in financial losses.

At the end of 2016, more than 14,000 restaurants in 20 countries around the world joined iiko, and about 40% of new opening restaurants in Russia use this system for automated business management.

Restaurant Automation and Video Surveillance

Retro cashier. It all started

Video surveillance has already been established in many establishments, but even though we live in the 21st century, the connection between the installed cameras and the same cash registers is simply not available at most restaurant owners. And it comes to ridiculous - in case of detection of a suspicious transaction at the checkout, the manager finds the time of this operation and manually searches for a recording from the camera relating to this time.

It is not so difficult to analyze a couple of operations per month, but the reality is that every day the cash desk generates dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of operations that may indicate substantial losses for a business. And in this case, analyzing videos manually is a huge waste of time.

IIKO allows you to manage the facility in real time, but the capabilities of the system are not limitless. The program reports alone cannot always tell where the problem occurred (and who accidentally gave the change to the buyer from his own money, and not from the cash register). Therefore, it became necessary to use together video surveillance cameras to visually record all the events taking place, and to carry out comprehensive monitoring of cash transactions.

Video surveillance systems, thanks to close integration with automation programs, track cash events in parallel with video recordings recorded by cameras. This allows you to visually identify the fact of fraud, as well as get a general picture along with information about the cash event.

In fact, fraudsters rarely invent something new, and most often follow the schemes that have been worked out over the years. Therefore, in order to curb fraud, additional modules were developed and introduced into automation programs that help to identify violations through the template algorithms of cashier actions.

The cloud service Ivideon has been developing video surveillance since 2010 (they wrote more on Habré ). Sooner or later we had to deal with the automation of restaurants. After interviewing dozens of users, organizing several conferences, the company began to create the necessary product. This is how the Ivideon Cashier project came about.

Ivideon Cash Desk: connect and use

Being in the personal account (LK) of Ivideon, the user selects the Cashier section and goes to the page of this section.

(If you haven’t come to Ivideon for a long time, you might not have noticed that we have updated the design of the whole LC)



The Ivideon Cashier solution quickly unfolds, does not require large start-up costs, and allows you to view the cash transaction and its video recording right in the tape of events.



Here, for example, the page “The figure of the day” in the statistics section - a brief summary of the numbers that speak about the results of the institution. All values ​​are considered by Ivideon forces, dynamically, depending on the events received from point-of-sale terminals.



On the "Cash events" page, the user can view events from the cash registers, along with video clips from the cameras. It is possible to reflect only the most important of a long list of possible actions by a cashier: from switching on the terminal after an incorrect shutdown (important) to transferring positions to a new order after a guest bill (normal).



Synchronization of the cash register with the camera will allow you to view a specific cash event simply by clicking on it in the event tape, rather than sitting and checking the tape of events in the cash software and video archive in time. Events can be filtered and view a list of all events for the week. And the selected event (event segment) from the archive can be saved to a computer.

And a little machine intelligence

Events in any cash register system answer the following questions:

● what happened;
● when it happened;
● who did it.

Each cash register system has its own text set of events that helps the user quickly navigate the situation. According to information received from iiko, per day for small and medium-sized businesses the average number of events in one order is 8–10, and the average number of orders in one establishment is 100–200.

Already in the first stage of developing a joint product, we were able to significantly reduce the amount of video recordings that need to be viewed to identify violations. Since now only the records in which there are events from the cash register systems are in sight, which means that at a given moment in time the operator performs certain actions that can be visually checked.

But even in this case, the number of records was such that their analysis required several hours of the operator per day to check the work of just one cash register.

And here additional intelligent algorithms come to the rescue, which make it possible to reduce the work of the operator to 20 minutes a day, by selecting the most suspicious operations automatically! And in this case, Ivideon becomes an indispensable tool for the administrator or owner of the restaurant.

So that the system based on the received events from the cash terminal could suggest the fact of fraud, it is necessary to understand the mechanics of the actions of an unscrupulous employee. For this purpose, a system of algorithms has been introduced, which helps to identify the probable fraud, or the operational error of the cashier’s employee, and notify the operator.

There are many methods of fraud with the cash register. Each of the methods is characterized by a set of specific events. For example, the operation of canceling a check looks very suspicious. The client ordered coffee, a guest bill was printed to him (this is an information sheet that did not go through the cash register, but looked like a check), and the client paid for it. A second person came and ordered coffee too. The waiter did not close the table of the previous client, but simply canceled the previous guest bill and pressed “Print dish again”. Thus, the previous check was not included in the system as paid. And everything - money can be stolen, and the expense of products (coffee) to write off on anything.

Connecting Ivideon to iiko allows you to automatically detect such violations and recommend the operator to pay attention to several events at the checkout, saving him time to look at all the records.

If the user wants to make sure right away that everything is in order with the cashier, then it is enough for him to view the image from the cameras and the cash register's event log.

If the user needs to receive notifications about possible fraud among staff, then he includes the function of receiving notifications, choosing those important events that he would like to receive.

Conclusions: connect

Ivideon uses iiko to monitor events from point-of-sale terminals, using the cloud architecture to store event and video information. The data is provided in a personal account interface familiar to our users from any browser. And if you only need to watch the video (without cash transactions), you can go through iOS and Android devices.

Briefly results:

● event control of cash transactions - you can find video cuttings of specific operations, as well as receive notifications about possible violations of cash discipline;
● export of video clips from the archive;
● view brief income statistics;
● interface in which it is convenient to view the event history;
● there is no cost for additional equipment or local storage with the cloud (although data can be stored locally via a hybrid recording);
● access to the system from any web browser or (without cash transactions) mobile browser;
● easy connection - download one program.

IIKO for us became a minimum viable product project, at the time of its launch we were not 100% sure of success. But the results exceeded all expectations and we launched the development of integration with several other popular box office systems. Right now we are starting testing work with the “SHTRIH-M” cash system. Email us if you have this automation system installed to take part in the test and get a free cash register camera from Ivideon.

Do you have a restaurant with iiko cashier, and you want to connect it to Ivideon? Leave your contacts at the link and get access.