Buyer's Guide for POS Cash Drawers

How do Cash Drawers Work?

A cash drawer allows storage of checks, cash, coins, stamps, and other valuable items, providing crucial security and organization for your point of sale, POS, system. In a typical point of sale system setup, the receipt printer sends a signal to the cash drawer, triggering it to open only when needed.

Which Cash Drawer Should I Buy?

There are a few important considerations to make when deciding which cash drawer model will work best for your point of sale needs. These considerations include, construction, interface design, locking functionality, media slots, and cash tray design.

Construction At POSGUYS.com, we categorize our cash drawers as either Heavy Duty or Medium Duty, according to the grade of thickness of the steel used in the unit's construction. Heavy duty cash drawers hold up better to dings, dents, and tampering due to their heavier drawer constructions and are higher priced. Medium duty cash drawers offer all the functionality of heavier cash drawers at a lower price, but do not stand up to damage and tampering as well.

Interface Design: The next step is deciding what type of interface design you want your cash drawer to operate with. Simply put, how do you want your cash drawer's opening to be triggered. There are three connectivity options for cash drawers, printer driven, which is the most popular, serial driven, or manually driven.

Printer Driven:Printer driven cash drawers are our most popular and recommended type of cash drawer. The drawer plugs directly into the receipt printer via hard-wire or interchangeable cable. The receipt printer signals the cash drawer to open when needed.

Serial Driven: Serial driven cash drawers plug into the serial port on the back of your POS computer. A serial cable connects the cash drawer to the computer.

Manual Driven: A manually driven cash drawer does not connect to the POS system and must be opened manually by the cashier.

Locking Functionality:

All cash drawers include locking mechanisms classified by their position capabilities. Generally, the more available positions a lock has, the more expensive the cash drawer will be. See the chart below for lock position functionality.

Media Slots: Media slots are the small openings on the front of the cash drawer that allow deposit of checks, coupons, or credit card slips into the space below the cash tray without actually opening the drawer. The number of media slots can vary from one to three.

Cash Tray: The cash tray, commonly referred to as the "till", is a plastic tray that fits into the cash drawer. The tray is used to sort currency, including bills and coins. Most cash trays are quite similar, with some variation in the number of dividers, the weight of the plastic, and the tray's situation in the drawer.

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