The ability to dispense cash from your kiosk can be invaluable for making change and reducing the need for human cashiers. Traditional bill acceptors only accept cash, but bill recyclers have the ability to both accept and dispense cash like a human cashier
Source: blog.kiosksimple.com
Your customers will appreciate your kiosks giving them change in bills, rather than dispensing a mountain of coins.
Even worse than dispensing coins is being mailed a check for the change. Yes, I’ve actually seen this done.
So why would you ever use a regular bill acceptor again?
For all of the upsides of dispensing cash from a kiosk, there are a few downsides which you should be aware of:
- Bill recyclers are bulky and may not fit into your existing kiosk without modifications. This can often be overcome through the use of an external enclosure.
- Bill recyclers are expensive, typically a few thousand dollars. This can be offset by the savings of reducing or eliminating cashier window hours.
- Bill recyclers are complicated devices that can take months to integrate into your kiosk application. Keep reading to learn how to cut the integration time way down from several months to a few weeks or even days.
I didn’t scare you off? Great, keep reading to learn more about dispensing cash from your kiosk with a bill recycler.
The 3 Steps for Adding a Bill Recycler to Your KioskStep 1: Selecting the right bill recycler
Crane makes several bill recyclers, our favorite of which is the MEI BNR (video below).
The MEI branded BNR (Bank Note Recycler) links MEI’s industry leading cash accepting technology with a robust four denomination recycling system. The MEI BNR was designed to mimic cash handling capabilities of a human cashier yet provides greater security and cash management benefits.
The BNR’s modular design leave the configuration capabilities wide open making it ideal for applications in self-checkout, retail payment, financial services and transport markets.
When deciding on a bill recycler you also need to take into consideration your kiosk operating system. If you’re running Android, good luck finding a bill recycler with an SDK for that operating system.
The Windows operating system offers the greatest number of bill recycler options due to the popularity of the OS.
Step 2: Integrating the bill recycler into your kiosk application
You have a couple options when integrating a bill recycler into your kiosk application.
The first option is to use the manufacturers SDK. This is for experts only due to the complex nature of bill recyclers and long integration times. For example, MEI said their typical integration time for the MEI BNR is 9 to 18 months.
Using the manufacturers SDK is too time consuming and complicated for most people.
The second and more attractive option is to take advantage of kiosk software which already supports your bill recycler. KioskSimple offers a very affordable plugin for the MEI BNR which makes it possible to integrate the bill recycler into your kiosk application in anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.
The savings in development costs is MASSIVE when you take advantage of the right kiosk software.
You also need to take into account if your kiosk application is a website or native application. I’m not aware of any bill recyclers with a JavaScript SDK for website integration.
This is why we developed the KioskSimple MEI BNR Plugin to support JavaScript, making it easy to integrate the bill recycler into your website. We also support .NET C# for native WPF applications.
Step 3: Quality Assurance Testing
Dispensing bills is risky business because there’s no way to get the cash back if you make a mistake (other than the goodness of your customer’s hearts).
It’s critical that you test the hell out of your kiosk application to ensure that everything is running smoothly, especially when dispensing cash.
Ready, set, integrate!
Ready to get started integrating the MEI BNR with KioskSimple? Checkout our detailed MEI BNR code examples in .NET WPF C# and JavaScript.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions. We offer free phone and email support for developers!
…Or let us do it for you
Want some help integrating the MEI BNR into your kiosk application?
We’re happy to lend a helping hand with the integration, even if you’re not a KioskSimple customer. Our kiosk consultants are available to come alongside your team and get your bill recycler integrated quickly.
Next week I’ll be releasing an article on the pitfalls of dispensing cash from your kiosk. Please subscribe to our blog emailing list to receive regular blog updates.