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Goodbye, Brinks truck, hello, Hewlett-Packard. Jeff Cuppett, who once worked in a bank's vault, where he threw "bundles of shrink-wrapped cash around like logs," is now entirely comfortable with intangible currency. In his office on Winthrop Street, he oversees the flow of Harvard transactions paid for electronically in virtual Crimson Cash. Photograph by Flint Born

Green thoughts in a Crimson shade. That's what blinks through undergraduate minds these days when they buy a soda or make a photocopy. The University IDs carried not only by students, but by 80,000 University-affiliated cardholders, provide access to a new kind of money--dubbed "Crimson Cash" by Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS), which administers the program. Walk into a College library and you'll find that photocopies purchased with Crimson Cash are cheaper than copies paid for with coins or dollar bills. This certainly creates an incentive to use the red stuff, but that's not why it's cheaper, says Jeff Cuppett, manager of card-systems technology, who runs the Crimson Cash program. "Handling real money is expensive," he points out. "You've got to send a Brinks guy around to collect the stuff all the time."

Here's how Crimson Cash works. You decide you want to add some value to your ID card. You place a phone call to the Crimson Cash service desk, give them your credit-card number, and request that $50 be placed in your account. Voilà. You're done. Or you can go to one of the centrally located value-transfer stations on campus, swipe your card through a reader, and put actual cash into the machine, which credits that sum to your account. The card's magnetic stripe is not actually encoded with cash; the card just gives you access to it. "Your money is sitting on a hard disk on my server," says Cuppett. It's the same principle used by a bank ATM card.

With Crimson Cash, which is an online system, every transaction is recorded on central computers. Students swipe their cards every time they eat in Harvard's dining halls. And that's why HUDS finds the system so valuable. HUDS's primary business is making the thousands of meals consumed campus-wide every day. Make too much, and you waste food and money. Make too little, and...who knows what might happen? The Crimson Cash system lets HUDS generate reports detailing things like "patron velocity." For example, a large lecture course in Sanders Theatre that gets out at noon every Tuesday and Thursday may lead to long lines or food shortages in Annenberg Hall on those weekdays--or to overstocking on the other three. But the new system lets HUDS identify such patterns quickly and respond. In fact, HUDS was able to justify the cost of installing and maintaining the Crimson Cash system on the basis of savings realized through better information alone. Only later did the College Library ask HUDS to implement the system on its copiers and microfilm and fiche readers.

Harvard is no pioneer in this field; Duke has had a similar system since 1980. Students elsewhere use it for bus privileges and book purchases, or access to athletic events and parking lots. At Florida State University, where financial aid is distributed this way, students get monthly account statements via e-mail, says HUDS manager of financial systems Raymond Cross. Harvard plans to attach Crimson Cash to laundry and snack and beverage vending machines this spring.

Because ID cards also give students physical access to their dorms (that independent system is run by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences), lost cards are bound to be reported quickly--students can't eat or enter a House or dorm without one. Old cards can be deactivated within minutes, so people aren't likely to lose the cash in their accounts. If someone tries to use a lost or stolen card, HUDS will be alerted automatically. More frequently, the system proves its worth by signaling downed photocopiers or soda machines. A repair call can be placed to the appropriate vendor even before the problem has been reported by a human being.

Cuppett says the Crimson Cash balance for the average student is $25 to $50; the total balance for the system is currently $55,000. For some, of course, the idea of money as information--with no physical counterpart--is too radical to accept. But an exchange of cash between two people is, after all, no more than an agreement that one has less and the other has more. In which case, money really is little more than a green thought, isn't it? Only Cuppett's computer knows for sure.

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