Receipt Printers

[Rathji]

We are moving from a handwritten receipt system at work to having a computer generated one. The developer has been working on it and started to talk to me about it today and I realized that they are probably going to be printing them out on full sheets of paper, but likely only need about 1/3 or 1/2 a sheet at most.

Thought I would tap the great CP brain trust and see if there was a way we could avoid this and not have it require a complete POS system.

I see you can get USB Thermal receipt printers. How well would something like that support printing from a document, like a PDF or Web Application?

Another alternative is being able to print on perforated half sheets on the existing printer, but that sounds like a nightmare to me, even if we could get it to work.

Any other options or thoughts?

Ideally, I want to have them build in an email receipt option, but with our clients a large portion will still need paper, so we have to have the option.

[You Need a Thneed]

Do you sell to businesses or consumers? Businesses should be fine with getting full letter sized receipts. Consumers might be a little different.

[Rathji]

We are a non-profit organization that bills clients for some of our counselling type services. A full sized sheet would work, but be rather wasteful from a cost and environmental perspective, especially since a large number of our clients are paying a very small fee for the services, like $5.

[You Need a Thneed]

Originally Posted by Rathji

We are a non-profit organization that bills clients for some of our counselling type services. A full sized sheet would work, but be rather wasteful from a cost and environmental perspective, especially since a large number of our clients are paying a very small fee for the services, like $5.

If it were me, I would just keep printing receipts on Letter size, but offer and even push email as an alternative.

I don't have any experience with receipt printers really, so that would play a part in my decision.

I suppose it makes a difference too on how many receipts you are printing. Printing only a couple a day and you might never pay off the purchase price of the receipt printer.

[Rathji]

Yeah, I really want to push the email option so you might be right.

After all, lots of these people are sending them to insurance and giving them a digital option might it easier to submit those receipts now that most insurance companies have some type of online submission.

[oilyfan]

I would think a USB thermal printer is your best bet. The developer has to develop a form in your system that has the print size and the formatting correct and it should print no problem.

[Hack&Lube]

Many small USB thermal printers come with good printing software anyway so it shouldn't be hard to tailor it to your receipts.

[Rathji]

All the info is pulled from our custom DB for each client/provider. I doubt the typical software would be able to support that, so we likely need something that can print either directly from a webapp or generated pdf.

[oilyfan]

Printing a PDF with the right dimensions and formatting should be easy to the thermal printer

This is a how-to for a similar printer: http://newsletter.solutionsgem.com/2...l-printer.aspx

[BloodFetish]

We use the Star TSP100-series printers which print on 80mm thermal rolls. Our POS server sends receipts to our terminal client (PuTTY) which in turn outputs them to the printer via the Windows print queue. Our POS server formats the receipts to be so many columns wide to fit on the narrow receipts.

Because we are using the the windows print queue any old program can send jobs to it. I can print a standard letter page to it but it will wrap lines, or (probably) cut off the right side in the case of a .pdf, however if you can format your output size then you'd be in business.

These printers are in the neighborhood of $200 and for me have been extremely reliable.

[para transit fellow]

Nevermind... I should read ever post in thread before making a comment