Cash settlement for retail establishments is often handled in a back room or other service area, where cashiers or other employees load and empty cash register drawers and count and record amounts of cash taken and returned. The comparison of the cash taken with the cash returned is often referred to in banking as “cash settlement.” This can also be referred to as balancing or reconciliation. Cash settlement in back rooms of retail establishments has often required separate calculations and record-keeping. While some cash settlement systems have been provided for banks in which personal computers have been connected to cash handling machines, there has not been a convenient and compact machine available for retail establishments.
Geib et al., U.S. Pat. Appl. No. 2001/0034203 published Oct. 25, 2001, shows a small coin sorter for filling a coin tray with coins counted by the machine. This allows a cashier to empty a till (also referred to herein as a cash drawer) into the sorter and have the amount counted. It is also possible to empty a batch of coins into the machine for counting as they are deposited in the till.
Machines of the type just described have had limited capacity for storing coins of various denominations. To serve a number of employees a bulk coin recycling machine must have an initial amount of coins to dispense to till drawers and must be able to handle large amounts of coinage received back from multiple till drawers at the same time it is also conducting dispensing operations. In machines known to date, the capacity of the hoppers has been small and no overflow mechanism has been provided.
Various types of machines for both receiving and dispensing coins have been known including ATM machines and large cash handling machines for gaming operations. ATM machines have generally been limited to dispensing change, cash withdrawals in the form of bills, or pre-rolled rolls of coin. The large cash handling machines for gaming establishments sort the change into bins, which must then be emptied. Change dispensers and small point-of-sale (POS) recyclers have also been known for dispensing change in multiple denominations to a retail customer via a single device such as a change cup, for example, where the denominations are mixed together.
There remains a need for a bulk coin recycling machine to track coin receiving and dispensing operations for multiple employees over a work shift and to reconcile the amounts received with the amounts originally dispensed—by employee—and record the difference. The machine should have the ability to sort coins by denomination, store coins by denomination and dispense multiple denominations, while keeping the denominations separate from each other. This is so that the cashiers will receive batches of coins in a sorted condition. The device should have networking capability with other automated cash handling equipment, such as note handling equipment and central accounting computers for reporting accounting totals. Such networking capability could utilize wires or be wireless.