Coworkers/customers who cling to “the old ways”

Makes me nuts.

I’m in int’l shipping as many of you know. We have lots of payments to make to freight carriers, airlines, etc. It costs about $16 to send a check UPS across the country. And $15 to send a check out with the local messenger service to a local vendor. It is $5-$10 to send a payment electronically with two payment services for our industry. We charge customers $25 for sending a payment, regardless of how it’s sent.

Nearly all of my coworkers flat out refuse to use the electronic payment services unless they have to send out a last minute payment. Management doesn’t care which is used, but I find it bizarre coworkers would rather have to deal with printing check, getting it signed, and doing up UPS label, and making sure it’s out in the warehouse in time to be picked up the same day than doing an electronic payment that doesn’t require them to leave their desk.

I only send out checks these days when I absolutely have to (such as when a company doesn’t participate in the electronic payment services).

I have one customer who refuses to use email and only uses fax. But he uses a service where a fax is converted to email, and vice versa.

That sounds bizarre to me.

My father was an accountant for the air force and part of the committee tgat created direct deposit for paychecks. He adamantly refused to use it until a few years before he died, when he was forced to for his pension checks. Personally i cant imagine using anything as inconvienient as checks to pay for stuff.

Oh, well do I remember the angst in my household about direct deposit. DH said he wants to hold his money in his hand, no direct deposit for him. I told him that he isn’t holding money he’s holding a piece of paper that represents money and I suppose he would have been against checking accounts when they were invented because he would’ve wanted cash money.


He agreed with me that he would’ve had a hard time making the transition from cash money to checkIng.

But I will say that he has progressed well the last couple of years. He recently after years of resistance, finally set almost all of our payments to automatic. That means of course that he has to make sure there’s enough money in the account all the time but nothing is late. There are still several things he pays by check though.

Tradd, I would think that at some point your finance office will require you all to process everything electronically.

I write 3 checks a month to people that don’t take cards such as my groomer, etc.

Tradd your office is like mine. We are told to throw requests to pay via ACH in the trash. But we are getting a modern accounting package next year to replace the DOS based one the old timers have clung to. Hopefully some of them who do not want to learn it will retire.

I only write one check a year and that's for paying the annual rent on the community garden. I can pay my water bill online to the village but not the community garden rent to the same entity. Other than that, I solely rely on electronic transfers, it's so much easier and wonder how early in my working life I caved in to the initial fear people had about direct deposit as my folks were very much the "I want to have that check in my hand" type people. It was only until I worked in payroll that I became a true believer.

At work, we really push for ACH payments versus check but there are just those customers / vendors who cling to the old ways. We even had the interesting situation where one supplier would not take a Purchase Order. That was weird.

When I needed to distribute some money to my sisters from a book sale, I insisted doing it electronically as one sister had Paypal and the other had an account at the same bank as me so I could do an internal transfer.