Best of the ISP-Lists

The End of Invoices

ISP executives urge colleagues to go digital and stop sending out paper invoices.

[January 22, 2009]

On the ISP-Wireless list in January, TJ asked:

I'm curious what everyone else is using for sending USPS letters and packages? We've had a nice postage machine (seals, stamps, etc.) that does our envelopes each month (about 1,500 per month). However, I'm getting tired of these companies (Neopost) charging $200 for a software update because the post office changes their pricing. What is anyone else doing? We send about 1,500 envelopes on the 20th of each month, and then only a couple a day the other days.

[CS noted] "I just got off the phone with stamps.com (they called me). We don't send any postage because all our billing is via e-mail but their service costs around $200 per year or $20 per month if you pay monthly. No other charge except for the actual postage."

[RS wrote] "We use pre-stamped window envelopes we buy from USPS. The main problem is that when there's a rate change we have to manually apply the extra postage until we run through the stock of envelopes at the old rate. We have looked at buying letter shop service, but we haven't found anything that meets our price point yet.

[We play] $235 for a box of 500 pre-stamped at $.42, i.e. $.47 each, including return address printing. No surcharge for window envelopes. There's a per box shipping charge of $8.60 for one box or $12.60 for two.

It's more expensive in boxes of 50. The return address printing options are limited.

See: http://www.usps.com/forms/_pdf/ps3203x.pdf

We've had mixed success billing electronically. Seems like a lot of customers don't think they owe anything unless they get a piece of paper. We're thinking of changing to emulating the banks and credit cards by starting off with paper billing but encouraging the customers to switch to 'paperless billing' voluntarily."

Many recommended charging extra for a paper bill.

[MC wrote] "We use e-mail for almost all billing. When they must have a paper invoice via snail mail, we charge $1.00 extra for it. Most will drop it."

[DB agreed] "We stopped mailing paper bills a few years ago."

MS said that tech companies should send e-mail bills:

"Many of our customers want a paper bill. When we switched, we first did it voluntarily. Not many changed. Not enough to matter. When we mandated it, we gave them an option of still getting a paper bill but we charge for that. I think we'll next do that with credit card payment.

Sure, we'll take your check, but it'll cost you a buck. Maybe not. I still have to run the numbers on what the cc company takes vs. what we spend in time dealing with payments. Most people that didn't like the new billing actually liked it when we taught them to just print out their statements (we don't do invoices anymore) and it'll be EXACTLY the same one that they'd get in the mail.

We also explained to quite a few folks that we're supposed to be a high tech, cutting edge company, yet we still use postal mail instead of e-mail! Yikes. They laugh and then understand. Some were also told that our time to get invoices out went from two people, two days to one person in 3 to 4 hours. That they really understood. In short, we got a lot less pushback than I was expecting."

[CS agreed] "That's exactly what we tell people. High-tech, saves in postage which is why we charge less for internet, etc. We mailed invoices in 1994 when we first started out. 50-100 mailings wasn't bad. But, in 95, we switched to e-mail. Took all of 2 billing cycles to get everyone on board. Our next effort is towards online payments. We've resisted this for a long time but more people want it now. Both checks and credit cards. Our bank just introduced batch check payments so we can submit them once a day if need be, both online and actual checks. We'll see how it goes."

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