Building Better Business Finances: Stop Driving to the Bank!

C'mon, be honest...

Hauling yourself to the bank to make your deposit every day is a pain in the shorts, isn't it?

As long as your business takes payment by check (and not by coin or currency), you can stop making that daily trip to the bank. How could that could be?

Ask your banker about a product called Remote Deposit. It also goes by Remote Banking, Remote Office, and a host of other names, but the idea is the same. You turn your office into a remote branch of your bank (if only you could print money there too!)

Here is an overview of how Remote Deposit works:

• The bank sells (or rents) you what is called a remote capture terminal. It is a small piece of hardware that sits on your desk. You feed your checks through the terminal, and the image of the check is then stored for processing.
• You use the bank supplied software to then transmit these images securely and directly to the bank to complete your deposit.

What's in it for you?

• No longer waste countless days over the course of a year driving to and from the bank and hanging out in line to make the deposit
• Most banks provide a longer business day when using remote deposit. For example, instead of having deposits after 3pm posting to the next business day, many allow same day deposits up to 5 or 6pm the same day.
• Acceleration of your cash flow so that you can use available funds more aggressively to pay down debt and reduce interest expenses.
• Convert the time you spend on non-value added banking activities into value-added and revenue enhancing activities (i.e. chasing customers down for overdue payments, helping to get quotes and estimates out the door, etc.)

Is there a cost for Remote Deposit?

In most cases, there is a cost to purchase or rent the terminal as well as a monthly cost to maintain the remote deposit service.

Naturally, if you are an extremely small business, this concept may not be cost-effective for you. However, if your business has any steady recurring volume of checks, it may pay for itself relatively quickly. Besides, there is a cost to the way you are currently handling your bank deposits - you just don't see it leaving your checkbooks each month!

With some negotiation, you can usually find a way to lower some of these costs as well.

Additional Resources on Remote Deposit:

• Handy Remote Deposit Calculator - see how much you could save.
• RemoteDepositCapture.com - learn more about this idea
• Background on Remote Deposit from Wikipedia

Are you using Remote Deposit in your business? Let us know how its' working out for you by posting a comment below!

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Comments

[Scott Gregory, QuickBooks Expert]

Hi Sara:

Thanks for your comments and insight about the concept of remote deposit - greatly appreciated.

Indeed, this is a case where there could be a great deal of "fine print".

I had a client that had some outside consultant going in online and viewing check images as part of his project. The client got a charge for over $200 from the bank the next month as they were being charged to view the images! This was unbelievable.

Scott Gregory

[Sara Laidlaw]

Love love love remote deposit, but compare the banks carefully. If a nonprofit, see if the bank offers a download of the check images to retain for your audit when looking for donor restrictions written on checks. Some banks say they do, but what they really mean is that you can click on EACH check and get a copy. You want one pdf file with all the checks.

We had a local bank give out free scanners to nonprofits and gave us the download that we need but we just found out that they merged with another bank and the monthly fee will be $50! They still cannot answer if we will be able to download the images.

I use Intuit’s service for my accounting firm, and when one won't scan properly, we have to go visit the bank. The tellers miss us!