Benjamin Franklin once said, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
You'd be hard-pressed to find better wisdom about insurance or crime prevention, especially from a source more respectable than the man who founded the oldest, continuously active insurance company in America.
So why is it then, that over 250 years later, warning signs of potential threats often go unnoticed, ignored, or are not acted on accordingly?
An owner or manager concerned about jewelry store security can solve this dilemma by routinely using a suspicious incident log.
This video shows why a logbook is important for knowing how to prevent crime, as well as what kinds of incidents should be flagged as suspicious.
We produced this video in 2015 and have advocated for suspicious incidents to be documented for many years. A physical copy is still useful for quickly jotting down notes before they're forgotten, but information that's written isn't the easiest to share among business associates or jewelry crime prevention networks.
Thankfully, the emergence of collaborative technologies has made this an issue of the past.
Here are a few resources to consider using to share more information, faster, and to more people:
By using Google Drive and Google Docs, you can create a running document or spreadsheet shared with other Google accounts that captures the same information as a physical logbook.
By doing it this way, your nice, neat columns can be searched or filtered by date, incident description, or any other variables you're tracking ... no more flipping through pages trying to match up patterns or trends!
Of course, all of this information uses cloud storage, so you can access it anywhere, at any time, and on any device. This especially comes in handy if you want to take a picture or video on your phone of surveillance footage and share it without having to print it off and put it in your logbook.
Social Media
If you have a large staff with many millennials or seasonal employees, creating a secret group on Facebook could fit your needs. On the other hand, if you're collaborating with a group of jewelry industry professionals, a private group on LinkedIn might work best.
Both of these offer the convenience of communicating on social networks that many people already use and have privacy features that keep the information from appearing elsewhere on your profile.
They may not have all of the features of Google's apps, but either group will probably be easier for people to adopt and use.
Other Tools
If you're part of a larger jewelry operation and want to integrate a logbook alongside of all of the other things your team is already working together on, you might consider a free project management software like Slack or Basecamp.
Something that complex isn't for everyone, but if you still want to document and share suspicious incidents to more people at a faster rate, a group text message or email conversation can be useful, too.
We also understand that good old-fashioned pencil-and-paper notetaking hasn't completely gone out of style. That's why we're happy to offer you a custom logbook to use at your business, just like the one shown in the video!