Every Christmas my wife finds a big project to double her holiday stress. This year, she volunteered to host a charity fundraising dinner for our church during Christmas.
The weekend before Thanksgiving, after several hours counting bills from the donations she had already received, she asked me to look into a bill counting machine for her. At first I flatly refused, thinking that it would cost at least a few hundred dollars. But she convinced me that she could get good use out of one, both with church events that she’s involved in and the various fundraisers and things she does for our kids with school.
I did some hunting online to see whether a bill counter would be a reasonable purchase. While doing the research to find one at a good price, I found that there is more to bill counters than you’d think. Perhaps you'll be more interested than my wife in what I learned.
My first observation was that most bill counters are made to detect counterfiet money. While I see this as a worthwhile concern in some cases, my wife's bill counter probably wouldn’t need this function.
I also quickly eliminated most of the bill counter options based on price. A lot of them are intended for use in business where high-volume counting is to be done, and the cost can run up to several hundred dollars.
There are some bill counters that will count both bills and coins - a cool invention - but I didn’t think that my wife would be needing to count coins very often.
I finally decided to get the Accubanker AB260 for several reasons. The AB260 is battery powered, which is perfect because my wife will want to use the bill counter at home initially, but she plans to use it later at church functions and ball games, where she won’t have an outlet available. The AB260 is ideal for small counting tasks like my wife will be doing, and the cost (about $120) was less than I expected.
We’ve only used it a little bit, but I’ll post an update in a month or so and let you know how I like the Accubanker after we use it for the holiday season.
