Many EASITRAX customers are in the process of installing credit card acceptors on their vending machines to capture previously lost sales. The simple fact that many vending consumers don’t carry low denomination currency or large quantities of coins has made it necessary to outfit machines with credit card devices. As the number of credit card devices in the field increases, so does the effort required to accurately track, manage and report cashless transactions in the office.

A few EASITRAX customers are considering an alternate method for streamlining the difficult task of credit card reconciliations in the office. Vending machine cashless transactions affect the existing machine inventory reconciliation (sales+) and introduce the need for a new reconciliation to balance credit card sales with credit card deposits.

Currently, the EASITRAX‘s best practice for recording cashless transaction sales includes capturing credit card values from the DEX stream during the time of the machine service. The credit card sales values are automatically recorded in the Easitrax vend ticket’s “debit/ credit card” field and are automatically reflected in the revenue values on the sales page and user reports. For those operators that use EASITRAX DEX functionality, this practice has proven to be both very effective and extremely efficient. For those operations that don’t take advantage of EASITRAX DEX functionality, credit card sales can be manually recorded on the vend ticket utilizing the same field.

Failure to record the incremental credit card sales on the vend ticket (either via DEX or manual entry) will force the vend ticket’s sales+ reconciliation to calculate a shortage equal to the amount of missing credit card sales. This is an accurate reflection of the variance between the retail value of the inventory that is no longer in the machine versus the amount of revenue (credit card sales) not reported in EASITRAX.

The periodic task required to reconcile credit card sales to credit card deposits is not as simple due to the varying frequency between the machine service, credit card reporting, and credit card deposits. EASITRAX, and by extension EASITRAX operators, realize vending sales and revenue at the time the machine is serviced. The Clearing Houses typically collect credit card sales information remotely via telemetry devices such as MEI’s Remote Data Port, on a daily basis. This type of remote reporting usually occurs late at night. The third variable needed for the reconciliation, credit card deposits, typically occurs on the following business day, or in some cases, the following calendar week. So it is a bit challenging to perform a proper reconciliation of credit card sales versus credit card deposits when the components are reported with varying frequency (periodic machine service, daily late night polling and periodic deposits).

Currently, the EASITRAX’s best practice for reconciling credit card deposits includes manually updating each individual vend ticket with the corresponding deposit and transaction fees. While this is an extremely effective practice, it is also very time consuming and perhaps includes an unnecessary amount of detail. These factors have led some operators to seek an alternate solution for reconciling EASITRAX credit card sales, Clearing House reporting, and bank deposits.

One of the most popular alternate solutions includes maintaining a separate vending credit card sales account in the operation’s accounting software for recording total daily credit card sales from EASITRAX versus periodic credit card deposits from each Clearing House. Performing the reconciliation on summarized information for a larger reporting period eliminates the need to tie each deposit to a specific vend ticket. If and when a variance between sales and deposits occur, the operator can simply use summarized data from both EASITRAX and the Clearing House to identify which machines are at the source of the variance and view detailed reporting only for the problem machines when such a problem exists.