On 11/25/2014 2:18 PM, Mike Hammett wrote:
Who are you writing checks to and why aren't you doing something better?
I haven't written a check in years.
One of my Interisle partners is a financial-IT expert, and knows the
banking system inside and out. He designed the network for Wall Street
twice, most recently after a rather sudden massive failure event in
September of 2001... but he doesn't do much finance work any more. The
industry has gotten too distasteful. We prefer that our major clients
pay by check. The partnership distributes member payments (e.g., my
pay) by check. Why not electronically? Because he knows the system too
well. It turns out that if you open your account to make ACH payments,
it's trivially easy for someone to take an unauthorized payment. A
personal account has 30 or 60 days to catch it and undo it, but a
business account has two days. So if somebody literally robs you via
ACH, you're out the money if you're not checking it daily. Corporations
with dedicated finance staffs can do that; small businesses like us
(four partners, no staff) can't. Similarly, the cost of electronic
payroll-type payments is way too high for a small business.
It is insane that the major automation to the US banking system (Europe
is ahead of us) is to use scanners to pass around pictures of checks
electronically. But the system works pretty well for handling checks,
so once you leave that paradigm, it gets funky fast. So we print
checks. And I then write checks out of my own business account, both to
pay myself and to pay rent and a few other business expenses.
--
Fred R. Goldstein k1io fred "at" interisle.net
Interisle Consulting Group
+1 617 795 2701
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