I have had a cummins jetscan two for about ten years. It really speeds up the counting process. I boght it when I was dealing with a much larger volume of bills and it was a lifesaver. They are not cheap but if you do enough volume the two pocket machines are worth the extra cost.
I'm not sure what the most efficient process is, but I run the money several times. The first time is in "Orient" mode. Its counts the money and sends all the bills oriented in one direction to the upper pocket, then all the bills oriented the other way to the lower pocket. It gives you the total money counted in both pockets for accounting purposes. I then use "stranger" mode which sorts the bills by denomination, placing the bill to be strapped in the top pocket, all other bills go to the bottom pocket. You run through one pass for each denomination. I then add up the strapped money with a calculator to ensure it agrees with the number I got on the "orient" pass"- so the money has essentially been oriented, counted twice, and strapped. It sounds time consuming but it takes me about twenty minutes to turn a bucket containing 2K of bills into a nice, neat, strapped deposit. The deposits are correct 99% of the time. The other 1% is usually attributed to human error (me).
I take all bills face up in the machines but if you want to take them face down you could run an additional pass.
I couldn't imagine counting a large cash deposit by hand anymore. I'm sure I'd manage if I had to, though.
