Patent ID: 6957733

Claim:
A compact, high-speed United States currency evaluation device for receiving a stack of currency bills and rapidly processing all the bills in the stack, the device comprising: an input receptacle adapted to receive a stack of United States currency bills of a plurality of denominations to be processed; two or more output receptacles adapted to receive the bills after the bills have been processed; a transport mechanism adapted to transport the bills, one at a time, along a transport path from the input receptacle to the output receptacles at a rate of at least 800 bills per minute; a discriminating unit adapted to count and denominate the bills including United States bills of a plurality of denominations at a rate of at least 800 bills per minute, the discriminating unit including a detector positioned along the transport path between the input receptacle and the output receptacles; and a processor programmed to flag bills meeting or failing to meet any of certain non-piece count related criteria, a bill meeting or failing to meet any of the criteria being termed a flagged bill, the processor being adapted to cause the transport mechanism to halt in response to a determination that a bill meets or fails to meet at least one of the criteria; wherein the certain criteria include a criterion of the discriminating unit determining the denomination of a bill, a bill failing to meet the criterion of having its denomination determined by the discriminating unit being termed a no call bill, the processor being programmed to flag no call bills, wherein the discriminating unit is further adapted to determine whether a bill has a denomination other than a target denomination, a bill having a denomination other than the target denomination being termed a stranger bill and wherein the certain criteria include the discriminating unit determining whether a bill is a stranger bill and wherein the processor is programmed to flag stranger bills, wherein the discriminating unit is further adapted to determine whether a bill is a suspect bill and wherein the certain criteria include the discriminating unit determining whether a bill is a suspect bill and wherein the processor is programmed to flag suspect bills, wherein stranger bills and no call bills are directed to a first set of one or more output receptacles and suspect bills are directed to a second set of at least one or more output receptacles, the output receptacles of the second set being different from the output receptacles of the first set.