Patent ID: 6883706

Claim:
A method of authenticating a bill at a point-of-sale terminal, the method comprising the steps of: imaging a bill presented for payment at the point-of-sale terminal to create a bill image; conducting optical character recognition on the bill image to determine bill authenticating data; determining whether the bill is authentic in real-time by: communicating the bill authenticating data to a currency monitoring system that evaluates bill authenticity by comparing the bill authenticating data to a currency database including a list of stolen bills to determine whether the bill was stolen, and awaiting an authentication response to the point-of-sale terminal; and reconciling the point-of-sale terminal by inputting at least one of a bill image and bill authenticating data of each actual bill present at a specific time and determining whether at least one of the bill image and the bill authenticating data of each bill imaged by the point-of-sale terminal has a corresponding actual bill present at the specified time based on the inputting.