If so, what is their secret? Is it practice or do they have some special technique?
Damn, wrong forum. This was meant for General Questions.
Not in my experience - of course, I’m basing this on the typical way that tellers count the money back to me verbally.
Example (taking out 200 dollars): “20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 20, 40, 60, 80, 200”
This way is faster than counting like this: “20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 120, 140, 160, 180, 200” but I’ve seen tellers do it that way also.
The fastest part (AFAIK) is that they have stacks prearranged - e.g. 5,000 worth of 100’s; or 1,000 worth of 20’s. That makes it easier for them from the get-go because it’s a recount / check rather than a first-time count of an unknown amount of money.
If you just hand a teller a wad of cash, I think that they probably count it at the same rate as anyone who frequently handles money (like blackjack dealers, etc.)
- Peter Wiggen
(anticipating the move to GQ, but, anyway)
The first time I got a job that required handling a lot of cash was this past summer (working at a movie theater). I can say from experience that, the more often you need to count out stacks of bills, the faster you do it - it’s just training your hands properly.
A further WAG: I’d bet that at a bank they’re more likely to have new, fresh bills, which are infinitely easier to deal with than old, soggy ones.
Former bank teller here. I hated stacks of brand new bills because new bills tend to stick together and are hard to separate. Older bills that are not mutilated separate easily.
There is no trick to speed. It’s just practice. If I received a wad of cash, I would separate it out by demonination, highest to lowest, and start counting. For example…
20 40 60 80 1 20 40 60 80 2 20 40 50 60 70 80 85 90 95 3 5 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 = $316
Counting cash coming in was faster than cash going out because I just counted to myself instead of counting it out to the customer. I could fly through thousands of dollars of incoming cash in a flash and I was able to pick out counterfeits in a split second, drop them from the stack onto the counter, and keep counting without losing pace. It was fun.
Counterfeits were confiscated, recorded, and sent to US Secret Service without a fuss. Whomever presented a counterfeit was just out-of-luck for whatever money they thought they had.
Oh… and a bank teller will frequently put all bills face up and facing the same direction because a good bank teller is able to count very quickly while paying attention to the following: (1) the number in the corner of the bill; (2) the face that appears on the bill corresponds to the proper denomination*; and (3) the texture and quality of the bill to spot counterfeits.
*to catch situations where someone glues the corner of a $20 bill onto the face of a $1 bill.
Moderator’s Note: Shuffling this from Great Debates on over to General Questions.
My wife’s a teller and although she does count money quickly she’s used to counting it several times over. I often get frustrated and grab the money out of her hands because she seems to like counting it so much (our money, of course).
I think they’re trained not to count money in the normal fashion though, ie: 20, 40 60 etc.
I can’t seem to remember how she was taught to count money though. I’ll ask tomorrow.
I’m not a bank teller, but I do count quite a lot of cash each and every day…I make the deposits for a small business. Without going into specific details, we’ll say I count between 2000 and 10000 dollars each morning (several times to make sure I’m counting correctly) and that doesn’t count making change for the cashiers (ie they need singles for their drawer, they need to break a 100 dollar bill) and working register from time to time on top of it all.) As others have said, alot of it comes down to practice, I’ve been doing it for years, so yes, I can count out say $3000 that’s all in $20 bills and smaller in under 30 seconds without making a mistake. I’d have to say that there are tricks, but nothing secret, as others have said, make sure the money is all faced and sorted is a big one, also after a while you’re hands kinda learn what to do to make the process faster (the less movement the better. I really only move my thumbs and they each move probably move about a 1/2 inch in either direction) and I don’t always count the money by denomination (what I mean is, I know that 20 $5 bills is $100 or 50 $20 bills is $1000 so I tend to count by one’s and go from there). So while their are tricks, it’s nothing sepcial, it’s just things that if you don’t regularly count stacks of money you don’t really have any reason to train yourself to count fast.
I was a fast-food restaurant manager for a couple years after high school. Yeah, it’s practice.
If there’s any secret trick, it’s as said above: learn how to count to yourself in the fewest syllables possible so you don’t slow your hands down to wait for your mouth.
It’s practice plus technique. The technique is to hold the stack of bills in one hand and then pull them out, one at a time, onto the desk. Once you master that, you can count pretty fast.
Personally that slows me down by about 1/2, I’m much better off holding the stack of bills in my left hand, pusing the top bill over with my left thumb and grabing it with my right fingers bringing it from the top of the stack in my left hand to the bottom of the stack in my right hand, my left HAND doesn’t move at all, just my thumb about a 1/2 inch in either direction, and my right hand moves back and forth about 1/2 inch or so. The less movement, the faster I can count, also counting, even in your head, will slow you down, so use small numbers whenever possible. ie when counting 20’s it’s 1…2…3…49…50 <-$1000 etc.
When I was a bank teller we were always taught to count hand-to-table as well as hand-to-hand. Hand-to-table is more accurate, but slower. Another thing we were taught to do for accuracy is to “face” the bills – arrange them so they are all facing this same way.
For large volumes we also had counting machines.
Bearflag, how common were counterfeits? And what denominations? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a counterfeit bill in my life.
I was never a bank teller, but I had to count cash for a retail business (which was, at the time, cash only; no credit cards etc.). I was also a change attendant in a casino. In both cases, when I had to count cash by hand, I learned this way of counting:
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Keep bills facing the same way always, and separated by denomination.
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Count pieces of paper. (That is, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.)
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Multiply number of pieces by face value.
Using this method, I could count cash frighteningly quickly.
I was a control clerk at a McDonald’s restaurant as a teenager, and I found that practice is really all there is to it.
In Japan, I’ve noticed that service people handling cash have a particular ritual which involves snapping the bills taut and counting them in two different directions (from the back, and then flipping them lengthwise to count them face up). It’s kinda cool the first few times you see it, and I have to say that I haven’t caught an error in change made for me in five years.
Ah, but if they are a stack of brand new bills then they are in serial number order, so it’s just a matter of reading the top serial number, the bottom serial number and subtracting. First time I saw this was a guy on campus doing textbook buyback, and seemed to be counting the bills with miraculous speed and accuracy (he was so fast we all had to check the count) finally worked out his secret. Bank tellers probably aren’t allowed to trust the federal reserve not to skip serial numbers though.
I probably saw about one counterfeit bill everey few months or so. The most highly counterfeited denomination was $20, probably because a $20 is the largest denomination likley to “slip under the radar” without much scrutiny.
Sometimes people would give me a huge stack of $1 bills. In the middle of the stack may be a bunch of brand new sequential bills that would stick together. I would have to unstick them to count them. Then, I would put the bills in my drarwer only to have to unstick them again when trying to hand the bills out to people. Pain in the butt.
Oftentimes what I would do is count the incoming bills, then I would have to stop when I got to the sticky part. I would separate the brand new bills by inserting older bills between them. It took a second but made life much easier.
Also, each bill had to be counted. No math based upon an assumption of serial numbers allowed.
I was a bank teller. They taught us to hold your left hand out, palm toward yourself. Make a fork with your pointer and ring finger below the stack of bills, and your middle finger over the top, covering the left side of Washington’s face. Your left thumb slides the corner of each bill down as you count them, and your right thumb holds them back.
When we counted out the money for customers (“Telling out” as it was once called, hence the job name), we laid it in a fan on the counter, which, once the customer picked up, meant that they agreed with it. Nowadays I see tellers hand people stacks of bills which some slight of hand expert could claim was inaccurate.