Datacap Credit Card Interface with SAM4s Cash Registers

OK, I get this question weekly. Can I interface my credit card terminal to my cash register. The answer is yes if you have the right credit card terminal. You must have a Datacap credit card terminal. The Datacap products are the only credit card device I know of that interface to cash registers.




So the Datacap products are not the traditional credit card terminal you are probably thinking of. The reason for that is that the Datacap products must have the cash register to work. Unlike the traditional credit card terminal Datacaps have no printer and no keypad as it uses the cash registers. Here is a picture of on of the standard Datacap terminals


As you can see it has not keypad and no printer. It does however have a serial port that connects to the cash register and a phone jack or Ethernet port to connect to either the phone line or the Internet. Yes this can process high speed over the Internet.

So once you have this connected to the cash register you can just put it under the counter and forget about it. Everything credit card related will now happen at the cash register. Once you ring up a sale and press the charge key of the cash register you will be prompted to swipe the card, you swipe the card, the cash register passes the info to the Datacap, the Datacap connects to the credit card network and approves or disapproves the transaction and give the info to the cash register, which then prints the information out on its receipt tape for the customer to sign. All this happens in just seconds and it really a fast process. At the end of the day you can batch for the cash register or have your service set up to auto batch in the middle of the night.

So why would you want to interface a cash register and credit card terminal? The three biggest reasons are speed, transaction accuracy, and security. How and why are explained here

• You do not have to re-enter the total of the sale into the credit card terminal thus saving time.
• You do not have to re-enter the total into a credit card terminal and make a big mistake (happen all the time) for an example often times a sale of lets say $19.99 could easily be entered as $1.99 and no one will notice. When interfaced to a cash register this can not happen.
• When interfaced you can not run a credit card transaction without ringing up a sale. The helps prevent theft to the business owner and card holder. What happened in the past is a cashier would use the merchant copy of a credit card slip and manually enter the credit card number of the last customer and run it for what ever dollar amount. They then take that dollar amount out of your cash register. When you run the end of day your receipts will still match you sale totals. You would have no idea a cashier just stole from you customer until your customer calls with the credit card fraud.

Learn more about Datacap here and find our more about Datacap terminals and Cash Registers here