Mail Equipment Management

Postal Advocate has over 241 years of mailing vendor related experience and is managing the largest fleet of mailing equipment and services in the industry.  This expertise is used to help you set up the best mailing agreements available in the industry.  Typical Savings – 20-40%

1. Leveraging your spend to get the best possible rates from the mailing vendors
2. Pushing the vendors for fixed price points and building internal catalogs to enforce pricing consistency.
3. Increasing the flexibility of offerings to include short term rentals and Online Postage options to reduce future lease obligations.
4. Working directly with the clients and vendors to ensure updated Master Service Agreements are put in place with the most favorable terms.

This is the largest opportunity for equipment savings in any organization. Many companies will let their mailing vendors define the requirements for their location renewals or work on an automatic lease-extension model keeping the same equipment in place for extended terms.

Postal Advocate’s defined right-sizing process is the main contributor to our 55% equipment savings and ensures that locations get the equipment that best suits their needs. Postal Advocate (Vs. the vendor) will work directly with your locations to define the application, provide the right options, assist with getting agreements approved, and follow up to make sure the new solutions are active and the old have been removed.

We will manage your future lease expiration dates to make sure this process is followed into the future and all notes and contacts will be documented in our enterpriseAdvocate^© system to ensure all details are captured when backup is required.

Postal Advocate will analyze postal equipment invoices for overcharges and will work directly with the vendor for receiving refunds or reduction of future costs.  Below are examples of opportunities which may be identified:

• Locations not getting the corporate discount or being billed at higher rates than defined in their agreements.
• Locations still being invoiced for equipment that was returned.
• Meter rentals, refill and advance charges, maintenance and scale rate changes that are being invoiced but should have been included in the lease.
• Loyalty Program Fees that are being paid by the location for a program that is included at no charge.
• Loyalty Program points that are sitting in accounts unused. Avoidable late fees and finance charges.
• Insurance fees that may not be needed will be removed.

Paying for mailing equipment can be difficult because there can be so many items to pay for and keep track of.  This gets worse if you have multiple locations with different agreements.  It is not only the equipment that can have charges for leases, meter rental, maintenance, rate changes, supplies and fees but also the postage for each device that could be run in prepaid or advance accounts.  It is common for large organizations to be paying tens of thousands in avoidable fees because they lack the visibility to what they are paying and the timing in which they need to be submitted.

Postal Advocate helps you regain control of your billing with the following:

• Complete location analysis for what your company is paying for today
• Bill consolidation to combine services and locations
• Assistance having Cost Center/GL Code/PO Numbers referenced on your invoices to make them easier to pay
• Assistance with new locations and office closings
• Assigning credit card to mailing expenses where required.

We look for any fees that can be eliminated that are not a requirement for the equipment. 

The following fees are those that we most commonly see our clients are paying before we begin managing their accounts:

• Late fees and finance charges that can be over 20% of the cost of postage
• Vendor-provided equipment insurance that is not needed since most companies have a blanket policy
• Loyalty program and other miscellaneous fees that can be eliminated

Optimize Postage Accounts and Recover Lost Funds

By managing our clients’ postage data, we recover funds from their closed and dormant postage accounts. As offices close, merge, or just terminate their postage meters, these funds can be forgotten. Also, due to limited visibility and confusion around how postage accounts are funded, money may sit idle for long periods of time.

We constantly monitor our clients’ accounts to recover their lost funds; and provide them with a web-based dashboard giving them full mail visibility and oversight for the future. We have found that there could be thousands or even millions of dollars in lost funds that we can help you recover. Postal Advocate has the tools and experience to help you locate and collect any money you are rightfully owed.

Situations that could cause this to happen:

• Closed/consolidated offices and subsidiaries
• Changed account numbers
• Returned equipment
• Vendor changes
• Non-terminated accounts
• Lost/stolen/non-inventoried equipment
• Remote permit accounts
• Excessive funding

We work with meter, permit and business-reply accounts. We do the legwork to make collecting these funds easy.