In bay bill acceptors & friendly auditing

[mjwalsh]

In bay bill acceptors & friendly auditing?

Question to those who have your bill acceptor in the same box: Do ever kind of see a potential advantage to not having to open your main box for the greater frequency of emptying the bills vs the much less needed frequency of doing anything else in your main coin box? I am still debating on whether to upgrade totally to one main box or adding a bill acceptor box.

It seems the vandals & thieves would tend to focus on the bill acceptor box leaving the main box hopefully alone with a separate box which could be a plus.

Does any vendor or third party add on vendor have a really friendly nifty way of allowing the operator to audit the pulse counts on an onsite computer? It could be even more important when employees are handling bills instead of just coins.

MJ

 

[MEP001]

I'd have to try and map it out, but I'd think you could use a pair of isolators, like the GinSan device used to split a coin pulse to a counter and the timer, and use a separate mechanical counter for coins and bills. A pair of low-cost relays would also work.

 

[thoffmanjr]

http://www.autocareforum.com/Articles/howto/tom-hoffman.html

We had our boxes built by a local fabricator for about $1,000 each. We use electric strikes to lock them up so the criminals can’t beat on the locks because there aren’t any. As you can see on the picture on the link the bill side is separate from the rotary switch and coin acceptor side. The first version we used was too thin and got broken into. We went with 3/16” since then I think and haven’t had any trouble since 2006 in 59 bays. Employees handle the bills and we empty the coins.

The employees enter a password on a touch screen and the locks open. The programmable logic controller (PLC) stores their name, the time, the date and the dollar amount in the bay and reset the counter to zero. We have 99.9% accuracy. It is rare it is off by a single dollar. We can monitor the amount of money in each bay remotely and print reports regarding the emptying of bays. There is also a way for the guys to empty the money and drop it in the safe without knowing how much is in it (unless they count it manually). We could come by and run the “owner’s report” to verify the cash and erase the data on the PLC. Of course we have video too.

Bill acceptor hook up: We use a solid state relay connected to the output wire of the bill acceptor. In the early days of doing this we were burning up the output circuit of the bill acceptor because it can only switch a 5 milliamp load and the PLC has a 7 milliamp load. The solid state relay only drew 3ma. The PLC receives the signal and then pulses back to our Dixmor LED9 with a relay.

 

[mjwalsh]

Tom,

I noticed on your link it said that your vacuums also had bill acceptors ---did you custom that too?! Thanks.

MJ

 

[thoffmanjr]

We do have bill acceptors on some of our newer vacuums. You could also monitor the bills in a vacuum the same way but we don't.