Small Banks, Big Business: Cash Management or Currency Management?

From our experiences, most of the institutions that have this problem (and there are a lot of them) still have manual systems in place to track overall cash volumes, and denominations in particular, at the branch level. Branch managers count and report cash on a periodic basis, but not currency denomination. Different institutions have different policies of course, but the overriding mantra is "never run out of cash". Today, as institutions look for ways to become more efficient, there is growing tension and debate among retail operations and cash management functions over proper cash levels in the branch.