The drawer is eleven dollars short on a Tuesday. It is ninety short the Friday after that, and by the end of the month somebody has started a note on their phone tracking which shifts the shortages land on.
Independent food businesses run on cash, comps, and a terminal that lets almost anyone void a ticket. Add seasonal hiring and a catering calendar where one person carries a cash box out to an event and back, and the conditions for a shortage are ordinary rather than sinister. Most shortages are a miscount, a scoop comped for a regular and never rung in, or a till that started the shift wrong.
The moment that matters arrives when an owner decides it is theft. Three doors open at that point. A conversation, a termination, or a police report. The third one starts a process the owner stops controlling immediately, because the decision to charge belongs to a prosecutor after that, and an owner who reconsiders next week cannot call it back. Theft in Nevada is graded by dollar amount, which means a running total assembled from a month of phone notes can push an allegation out of misdemeanor range and into felony range on paper.
The accused side of this is understood even less well. A twenty two year old who writes and signs a statement in a back office, before anyone explains what the paper is or that writing it is optional, has handed over the strongest single piece of evidence in the case. That happens in small businesses constantly, usually with no malice from the owner at all. Both sides are better off knowing that a Las Vegas firm that handles theft and embezzlement accusations publishes pages explaining how those charges are graded in Nevada, because an owner reading them and an employee reading them are each in a better position than either one improvising at the back table.
Operators can remove most of this with a habit rather than a camera. Count the drawer at open and at close with a name attached to each count. Record comps and voids somewhere a manager has to approve them. Reconcile catering cash the day the van comes back. A shop doing that either never has the conversation at all, or has it with a record instead of a suspicion, and that record is the first thing a prosecutor asks for if a report does get filed.