Is USPS driving anyone else crazy? They are losing outbound checks from my business at an increasing pace, and it's getting really annoying. I am just curious if a) anyone else is seeing this same issue, and b) what, if anything, you are doing about it. A little background...
I run a small construction company that has been in business for a very long time. We generated about 700 A/P checks per year (688 in the past 12 months...I just verified) and I doubt that volume has changed too terribly much in the past two decades. The overwhelming majority of these go out regular old USPS snail-mail. Very Large Checks are hand-delivered where practical, and FedExed when not. But everything else goes out with the USPS mail carrier.
Up until 2020, I'd say this worked exceedingly well. One got lost in the mail every now and again. Maybe once a year. I'd put the USPS successful delivery rate at 99.8%-99.9%. At fifty cents a pop, or whatever it was at the time, I think that's pretty good. No complaints!
Then Covid happened in 2020, and they got kinda spotty there for a while. But that was really just during 2020 to the best of my recollection. Seems like by 2021 it was back to normal.
But now here in the past six months or so, it seems like they are losing minimum one per month. Every time I reconcile the bank statement at the first of each month, there's an old uncleared check or two to run down and remedy. When I reconciled April just now, I found three!
I just did the math...of the 215 checks that we have written from 1/1 to 4/15, seven of them have not been delivered. So that puts them a shade under 97% success rate YTD. That's getting dangerously close to unusable, in my opinion.
Are others seeing this as well? Are you trying to use other methods to pay vendors?
We are using QuickBooks Desktop (still!) Pro Plus if that makes a difference.
I run a small construction company that has been in business for a very long time. We generated about 700 A/P checks per year (688 in the past 12 months...I just verified) and I doubt that volume has changed too terribly much in the past two decades. The overwhelming majority of these go out regular old USPS snail-mail. Very Large Checks are hand-delivered where practical, and FedExed when not. But everything else goes out with the USPS mail carrier.
Up until 2020, I'd say this worked exceedingly well. One got lost in the mail every now and again. Maybe once a year. I'd put the USPS successful delivery rate at 99.8%-99.9%. At fifty cents a pop, or whatever it was at the time, I think that's pretty good. No complaints!
Then Covid happened in 2020, and they got kinda spotty there for a while. But that was really just during 2020 to the best of my recollection. Seems like by 2021 it was back to normal.
But now here in the past six months or so, it seems like they are losing minimum one per month. Every time I reconcile the bank statement at the first of each month, there's an old uncleared check or two to run down and remedy. When I reconciled April just now, I found three!
I just did the math...of the 215 checks that we have written from 1/1 to 4/15, seven of them have not been delivered. So that puts them a shade under 97% success rate YTD. That's getting dangerously close to unusable, in my opinion.
Are others seeing this as well? Are you trying to use other methods to pay vendors?
We are using QuickBooks Desktop (still!) Pro Plus if that makes a difference.