[genera1]

> The small piles would have 1000 notes in them, which is easy to check in a day.

By the time you could even buy an 8-bit home computer for couple hundred dollars, store all the serial numbers on a floppy and simply search through them once per day

[OscarCunningham]

That would let you check instantly if you had that dollar, but you'd then have difficulty physically finding it.

[llampx]

Create an index. Sort the notes into sets of 1000 and label them, add the label as a column into your Foxpro database.

[mywittyname]

Most likely scenario, you never look sort through it again. Least likely scenario, you get $30,000 (probably like $280,000 in today's money) to dig through them all one more time.

[Dylan16807]

That would take so much more time than sorting each batch of 1000 notes, and sorted notes let you do your daily check in less than a minute.