Cashless catering is a
prepay point of sale
The point of sale (POS) or point of purchase (POP) is the time and place at which a retail transaction is completed. At the point of sale, the merchant calculates the amount owed by the customer, indicates that amount, may prepare an invoice f ...
(POS) technology that allows transactions with the absence of
cash
In economics, cash is money in the physical form of currency, such as banknotes and coins.
In bookkeeping and financial accounting, cash is current assets comprising currency or currency equivalents that can be accessed immediately or near-im ...
at the time of purchase.
It is used in
canteen
{{Primary sources, date=February 2007
Canteen is an Australian national support organisation for young people (aged 12–25) living with cancer; including cancer patients, their brothers and sisters, and young people with parents or primary carers ...
s, particularly those in schools. The use of the technology has expanded to include
music festival
A music festival is a community event with performances of singing and instrument playing that is often presented with a theme such as musical genre (e.g., rock, blues, folk, jazz, classical music), nationality, locality of musicians, or ho ...
s such as
Ottawa Bluesfest
Ottawa Bluesfest is an annual outdoor music festival that takes place each July in downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. While the festival's lineup historically focused on blues music at its inception, it has increasingly showcased mainstream pop, h ...
and
Wireless Festival
The Wireless Festival is a rap and urban music festival that takes place every year in London, England. It is owned and managed by Live Nation. While it started as primarily a rock and pop festival, in recent years it has focused on hip hop and ...
, where the system has been integrated into
RFID
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) uses electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects. An RFID system consists of a tiny radio transponder, a radio receiver and transmitter. When triggered by an electromag ...
wristbands.
System
Users of the system have a
profile
Profile or profiles may refer to:
Art, entertainment and media Music
* ''Profile'' (Jan Akkerman album), 1973
* ''Profile'' (Githead album), 2005
* ''Profile'' (Pat Donohue album), 2005
* ''Profile'' (Duke Pearson album), 1959
* '' ''Profi ...
which stores information such as the account balance, personal details and a photograph for verification purposes.
Cashless catering systems can use a variety of user identification methods, such as
PIN entry,
Fingerprint recognition
A fingerprint is an impression left by the friction ridges of a human finger. The recovery of partial fingerprints from a crime scene is an important method of forensic science. Moisture and grease on a finger result in fingerprints on surfac ...
,
Magnetic stripe card
The term digital card can refer to a physical item, such as a memory card on a camera, or, increasingly since 2017, to the digital content hosted
as a virtual card or cloud card, as a digital virtual representation of a physical card. They share ...
s,
,
and
Smart cards
The cost to a British
high school
A secondary school describes an institution that provides secondary education and also usually includes the building where this takes place. Some secondary schools provide both '' lower secondary education'' (ages 11 to 14) and ''upper seconda ...
of setting up a cashless catering system was approximately £21,000 GBP in 2012; for
primary school
A primary school (in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and South Africa), junior school (in Australia), elementary school or grade school (in North America and the Philippines) is a school for primary e ...
s it was £7,500.
Systems require annual maintenance at approximately £2,500 for high schools and £1,000 for primary schools.
See also
*
Biometrics in schools
Biometrics in schools refers to the use of biometric data such as fingerprints and facial recognition to identify students. This may be for daily transactions in the library or canteen or for monitoring absenteeism and behavior control. In 2002, P ...
*
Electronic money
References
{{reflist
Payment systems