Hello Network!
Greetings from the California Academy of Sciences. We are celebrating our one week go live anniversary today!
One item, that seems simple enough but is giving us lots of challenges is triggering the cash drawer to open after a cash transaction. We are self-hosted and using BOCA printers for tickets and receipts. We have tried numerous configurations from direct BOCA connection to Serial to USB adapters. We have not yet found the magical solution. Do any of you have this figured out?
Best,
Carl
We had the same issue. Our I.T. team had to get USB triggers.
Congratulations on your go-live! We had a little chuckle at your forum post here... We tried getting the cash drawer pop to work so many times during our implementation and eventually gave up. Since then, it's become a running joke, a humorous symbol of failed efforts.But I know other folks have found solutions. Good luck, and welcome to the network! :)
Wait...our drawers don't pop?
On a serious note...have you figured this out? Does your team have a solution??
And you've made sure that the "open cash drawer" box is checked in Campaigns-->References on the Payment Methods tab for cash payment method? Maybe this is a dumb question, but I feel it's worth asking. I'm assuming your implementation team would have caught that right away.
It's always a checkbox.
Ain't that the truth?
Box checked, unchecked, and checked again.
We ordered these USB triggers to test. We'll let you know how it works.
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/BT-100U-Drawer-Driver-Trigger-Interface/dp/B01BAGD0PY&sa=D&source=hangouts&ust=1558632487948000&usg=AFQjCNHXFy_0gUy8QaR__qZlIglGUxRHjw
I am not sure if this will work for you but we have our Boca printer set as the default printer and we modified our Tessitura.ini file on each workstation in C:\Tessitura by adding this at the bottom:
[CashDrawer]
ConnectionMethod=TicketPrinter
Port=
OpenSequence=
PortBaudRate=
PortDtrEnable=
PortRtsEnable=
PortDataBits=
PortStopBits=
PortParity=
We went partially live on RAMP last October, but are getting ready for our full time seasonal startup at 14 sites now. (More will be following using laptops or TRBO later.)
We made the decision to omit receipt printers since the Boca equipment seems finicky and expensive and early tests revealed that most visitors didn’t care that much about paper receipts anymore. We can e-mail receipts if they do, and/or print confirmations to a page printer. (We are finding that the lack of paper receipts can cause occasional complications in certain scenarios – mostly when someone buys a ticket as general public but then later returns and wants to become a member. Still, overall, we’re happy with the no receipt printer solution.)
Not so much joy on the cash drawer front. We have been involved in an epic 8-month struggle to get our chosen USB cash drawers (Bematech/Logic Controls CR-3003) to pop. This has included shipping a unit to a Tessitura developer and at least two version 15 updates with specific code to address the problems. As of today, we’re still not there, although we have seen it work fleetingly only to have it stop working again. We’re in conversations at a high level with Tessitura about this.
It seems some of the complications have to do with the acrobatics Citrix uses to tunnel COM port connections over to the virtual desktops running our RAMP-based clients, and the various settings buried in back-end configuration files to make that work.
Sounds like you guys are in the acceptance stage of cash drawer grief – we’re still going back and forth between anger, bargaining, and depression.
I can update when we finally get it working reliably. Hopefully. Sigh.
-David