Barcode Education

Ordinarily, most businesses process credit card transactions using a stand-alone software package supplied by their bank or financial institution. Third party software is available that will support most credit card transactions. If the supplied credit card package is a stand-alone application, the user's host application will not be able to pass information from a sales transaction to the credit card software because of it's restrictive design. The customer's information and the sales information must manually be entered into the credit card program.

Of all general business transactions, credit card processing involves the most repetitive data entry job where many mistakes are made. Numbers are transposed, decimal places in the dollar amounts are off by one or two digits, numbers are incorrectly keyed in, etc. The credit card number alone has 10 or more random digits! By bar coding the credit card number, the expiration date, and the dollar amount on the order, an operator can achieve nearly 100% accuracy and save as much as 50% of the processing time for each credit card transaction with a simple bar code wedge decoder and a CCD scanner.

If the credit card number, the expiration data, and the dollar amount were bar coded, the operator would simply scan each of these fields directly into the credit card application. Most wedge decoders even support pre- and postamble characters that allow TAB keys, ENTER keys, as well as many other characters to be appended to the data to step the operator through the same keystrokes required to enter the information manually. If high-volume credit card processing is a routine procedure, this solution is a must.