What I’d Want in Writing Before Bolting an ATM to Someone Else’s Floor

A handshake with a bar owner feels great on the day it happens. It’s worth almost nothing three years later, when the bar has been sold, the new owner wants the corner for a jukebox, and you’re standing there with a 300-pound machine and no paper. If I were placing ATMs, the thing I’d obsess over isn’t the machine or even the split. It’s what’s written down.

Here’s the way I think about it. When you put an ATM in someone else’s business, you’re not really buying income. You’re buying a right: the right to occupy a few square feet of their floor and collect a fee from their customers. That right is only as strong as the document behind it. A route with written agreements is an asset you can sell someday. A route built on “yeah, sure, put it over there” is a job you can’t hand to anybody.

What follows is how I’d approach the deal. I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice. It’s how I’d reason about the tradeoffs before I paid a local attorney to look at my template once.

First decide whose money is in the box

Every ATM deal comes down to three questions: who owns the machine, whose cash is inside it, and who gets what share of each fee. The answers move together. The more risk and capital the venue carries, the bigger their slice should be.

Arrangement	Who carries the cash	Venue’s typical slice	What I’d think about it
I own the machine, I load it, venue gets a cut	Me	Somewhere around 20–50% of the surcharge, or roughly $0.50–$1 a withdrawal	The default. Most control, most capital tied up.
Flat monthly rent to the venue	Me	A fixed dollar amount	Only for a spot I’d already proven. Rent doesn’t care about slow months.
Venue loads its own cash from the till	The venue	A much bigger share, sometimes most of it	Frees my capital for the next machine. Needs a cash-heavy, trustworthy owner.
Venue buys the machine outright	The venue	Nearly all of it	That’s a sale, not a route. Fine, but it’s not an asset I keep.

Those ranges come from what processors and equipment sellers publish; real deals vary a lot by market and by how busy the spot is.

A little math on why the split matters less than you’d think

Let’s say a machine does 150 withdrawals a month at a $3 fee. That’s $450 in surcharges. Here’s the difference between a stingy deal and a generous one:

• Venue gets 20%: they get $90, I keep $360.
• Venue gets 40%: they get $180, I keep $270.

That $90 gap is real money. But now imagine the stingy deal has no protection if the bar is sold, and the generous one has a three-year term that survives a sale and can be handed to a future buyer. If the stingy spot disappears in month eight, it earned me about $2,880. If the generous one runs the full 36 months, it earns about $9,720. The length and strength of the agreement moved the outcome far more than the percentage did. That’s the whole point of this post in one comparison.

The questions I’d want my agreement to answer

Instead of a template, here are the questions. If your document answers each one clearly, you’re in good shape. If it’s silent on any of them, that’s where the fight will be someday.

How long does this last, and how does it end?

I’d want a real term, something like two or three years, with a simple renewal and a notice window. Long enough to earn back the machine and then some. Not so long, or so penalty-heavy, that the owner feels trapped. People remember feeling trapped, and they tell other owners.

What exactly is being split?

This is where friendly deals turn sour. I’d spell out that the venue’s share is a percentage of the surcharge on completed cash withdrawals, not interchange, not balance checks, not declined cards. And I’d say whether it’s before or after the processor’s per-transaction fee. Neither answer is wrong. Leaving it vague is.

When do they get paid, and how can they check it?

Monthly, same date, with a report from the processor. I’ve always believed you take care of your people, and in a placement business the venue owner is one of your people. The ones who get a clean statement on time become your references. The ones who have to chase you become your competitor’s next yes.

What if the machine doesn’t earn?

I’d want the right to pull the machine without penalty if it averages below a set number of withdrawals over a few months. This protects both of us. The owner isn’t stuck with a dead box in the corner, and I’m not stuck paying rent or a share on a spot that loses money.

What if either of us sells?

This is the clause I’d fight hardest for. If the bar changes hands, the agreement should go with it, or at least the owner should have to tell the buyer about it. And if I sell my route, I need to be able to assign the agreement to whoever buys it. Without that second part, a buyer is purchasing used machines, not locations, and the price reflects it. When I think about selling a small route business, transferability is what turns years of work into an actual sale price.

Who’s responsible when something goes wrong?

The machine and the cash inside are mine, so the insurance is mine. The owner shouldn’t be on the hook for a break-in unless they caused it. The disclosures, card-network rules and accessibility requirements for the machine are my job too. Putting that in writing makes the owner more comfortable signing, which is the point.

Can someone else put a machine in?

Exclusivity. One ATM per venue during the term. Two machines splitting one bar’s demand is how both operators end up unhappy.

An illustrative example: the same bar, two ways

Consider an illustrative example with made-up people. Priya and her neighbor Jonah each start small ATM routes in the same city. Jonah moves fast. He places four machines in a month, all on handshakes, with generous 50% splits because he wanted the yeses. Priya places two in the same month, each with a three-year written agreement, a tiered split that starts at 25% and rises with volume, and a clause that survives a sale.

Eighteen months in, two of Jonah’s four venues have changed owners. One new owner kept the machine; the other asked him to take it out that week. Priya’s best bar also sells. Her agreement goes with the business, the new owner keeps receiving the same monthly statement, and nothing changes. A couple of years later Priya decides to sell her eight-machine route to focus on something else. The buyer’s first request is a folder of signed agreements. She has one for every machine.

Neither of them is real, and neither outcome is guaranteed. But I’ve watched enough small businesses to know which of those two stories is more common.

The detailed operator guide on this exact topic is ATM Placement Agreement: Revenue Share Splits and the Clauses That Matter, on VendBuddy’s (full disclosure: VendBuddy is my company) site. It goes further into the specifics than I have room for here.

What I’d actually do this week

1. Write a one-to-two page agreement in plain English that answers every question above.
2. Pay a local attorney once to review it. It’s a small cost next to a route’s worth of agreements.
3. Decide my default split and my walk-away split before I meet anyone.
4. Print two copies for every pitch.

And then I’d go find venues worth signing. If you want a head start on the list, VendBuddy (vendbuddy.io/app) finds bars, corner stores and laundromats in a ZIP along with who actually makes the decision, and credits are sold in one-off packs, so there’s no subscription to cancel later.

The broader lesson is one I keep coming back to, whether it’s vending machines or real estate: the paper is part of the asset. Income you can document, transfer and defend is worth more than the same income held together by goodwill. Build it that way from the first machine.