[red-beard]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

Sorry, this is long, but I want to explain this first.

The banking industry has been using paper checks since the times of the Roman empire. We have a vendor that provides us a simple service, that saves us a lot of tedium and boring time at the computer, and they are better at it than we can do it ourselves. We just mark up the service and sell it to our client as an add on feature.

That vendor is trying to move into the future of 2022 and go truly paperless accounting, and is really wanting us to not pay with a simple analog paper check. I can print the check with QuickBooks with a few clicks of the mouse, so it is really easy for me, but difficult for them for some reason. For a business I have to have accurate financial records and for a small business, QuickBooks makes it easy. I enter the bill and categorize what account and catagory it is tied to, tie it to the general ledger and all the things my CPA insists i needed to keep the IRS happy.

To pay with a credit card involves a fee of usually 3.5% and that adds up quickly. They don't want to eat that cost and neither do we.

For my business we use a local family owned bank that has a nice convenient location, and by law credit unions can't do commercial bank service, so we are stuck with using a bank. If I initiate a bank transfer, my bank charges us $12 flat fee. They offer a bill pay service, but it just prints a paper check and mails it to the vendor and that does not help.

I know there are several companies doing a third party bank transfer. Zelle does it for free, but any service offered for free means I am the product they are selling.

Paypal does it, as does other services.

How do you do a bank transfer? Does your bank do it for a low fee? Do you use a phone app or a computer driven web site?

We have avoided a PayPal account for the company as I really don't feel warm and fuzzy trust for PayPal. This would be paying for a service we have already received so fraud is not an issue. We just need a reasonably easy and secure way to pay a vendor for an invoice. It might me three in one month and none for months at a time, so a monthly fee is not something I want to deal with either.

On-line Quickbooks uses Melio. Melio can do with an ACH or Paper Check.

My Chase account I can pay vendors direct with an ACH payment. There is a way to create a CSV file with all of the payments you want to make and then upload them to Chase. I think most of the bigger banks can do this.