Thursday, 1 December 2011

Pitney Bowes Meters: Top Values to Use a Postage Meter

By Chris Ulrich


Let's review the benefits and varieties of choice available to your small business when selecting and implementing a postage meter to enhance your mailing efforts, including some important questions similiar to deciding if your business is ready to automate the mail effort and also the main features of a postage machine system.

Even if you send what you consider to be only a small amount of mail, a postage machine is an addition to just about any office environment. Metered mail is more professional looking, is more convenient and can often lead to great savings. It also conveniently requires less trips to the post office if you have office building late day pickup.

A good estimate on whether your business might benefit from a postage machine is if you have more than $50 per month in postage costs. The resourcefulness to being able to print exact postage on demand has also been shown to cutback business costs. When checking the exact postage meter for your business requirements though can be difficult. To help, consider the following:

1) What does the business payout every month on average in postage?

2) What is the amount, how many unique pieces of mail are sent on a weekly basis?

3) Do we send mostly basic sized letters, or are there a mass of packages of inconsistent dimensions and weights?

How you acknowledge these will aid you in figuring the features that are utmost necessary in choosing the right model postage machine for your small company.

Let's review a quick tour of the basics of metered postage. The meter itself is the most vital aspect of the mail system. It eliminates the place of the solo separate stamp, printing what is known in postal lingo as the "indicia," and also stores the used postage amount(s).

Note that you cannot purchase your postage machine, rather it must be leased. You can own other portions of the overall system, however,but ownership of machines themselves is regulated by the federal government.

While most meters are similar in basic function and handle up to one thousand dollars in postage, and all models are able to prepare first class, priority, and express mail, and packages. Postage machines may also be implemented for reduced bulk mail, but this needs a permit from the US Postal Service.

Where postage machines begin to vary is in different features such as:

1) Accounting codes, 2) Automatic postage reset, 3) Automatic date advance, 4) Password-protected access and 5) Saved presets for common mailing jobs

In addition, digital meters add an additional level of security by implementing the printing of a two dimensional bar code which determines the sender as well as the intended receiver. Some digital postage machines are able to be updated electronically, keeping them current with changing US Postal Service rates. Non-digital meters on the other hand require a costly upgrade to the chip inside when the costs change.

This is a simple outline of some of the important features of an automated postage meter system and we hope it aids you in your chose making process in determining what kind of machine might be right for your small company.




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