Last month I finished paying off my car. Apparently I overpayed, because GMAC sent me a check for 23 cents. I held onto it for about a week before I deposited it; no way was I going to make a trip to the bank just to deposit a 23-cent check.
I may have told this story before…When my wife died a few years ago we had a joint mutual funds account. I called to find out what I needed to do to close the account, or if it was possible to have the balance transferred to another account that I had in just my name. I was told that in order to close the joint account and have the balance issued to me I had to provide not only a certified copy of her death certificate, but some sort of court document (the exact nature of which escapes me at the moment, but it would have involved me paying a filing fee to get it). I decided that it was easier to just write out a check from the account for the current balance, figuring that with a zero balance they would just close the account.
What I neglected to consider was that the account accumulated interest paid monthly. When I received the next statement, it showed an interest credit of 7 cents. I received monthly statements from them for at least six months before they send me a notice that the account was being closed for “insufficient balance” and an enclosed check for $0.07, which I then cashed with no problem, despite the fact that it was made out to both me and my late wife.
Dude, you could have been collecting interest on it that whole time!
By the same token, it only takes one line of code in their billing system to not bother to send out a bill for < $1 unless the account is being closed and they need it to even up. Just roll it over to the next month.
My city was charged $955 for a 4-cent billing error by the The Ohio Public Employees Retirement System. OPERS was nice enough to go back and fix the error and erase the charges. :-/
And next month the customer gets charged a penalty for not paying it. Unless you also add code to handle that. Adding exceptions to the normal process is not something you do on a whim. Adding the lines of code is just the start. You need to change the documentation on how the system now works and test the change. It’s likely cheaper and safer just to leave things alone and let the normal process happen.
And in that circumstance, I would rather get a bill showing a zero balance than wonder who got hold of the credit card bill that I didn’t receive.
I just paid off one of my credit cards (Yay for me!) and I’d *better * get a statement that says I have a zero balance. :dubious:
Good point - I know they don’t use stamps, but I’m not sure if they get a discount rate either.
I once saw a charge on my AMEX statement that I didn’t recognize-it was a mail order place that used a differnt name, from the catalog I ordered from. I called up AMEX, and they were very nice about it-they said i didn’t have to pay the charge, and that they would open a dispute. next month, i saw it, and remembered the story-so i called up, and offered to pay them. I explained that the charge was legitimate, and sent them a check-which they returned. After 4 months, they sent me a check for the amount-I guess I couldn’t dissuade them.
Send them a check for $0.11, then demand they immediately close your account. 
A while back I was living in the States, and I procured for myself a credit card down there. After I moved back to Canada I hung onto it for a while, but it sat at 0 balance for several months. (They didn’t send out a statement every month; after the first month with a 0 balance I didn’t get anything from them in the mail.) After some time I got a balance statement reporting a tiny credit, 37 cents or some such, due to a settlement in a class action lawsuit against the credit card company. At that point I decided to cancel the card and close the account, so I called them up and did so. They duly sent me a cheque for 37 US cents, which I let collect dust on my desk since there was no way I was going to the trouble of standing in line to cash it and convert the currency to $CDN. A few months later, I got a letter saying that they had no record of me cashing the cheque, and if I didn’t do so within X days it would be cancelled. A month after that, I got a phone call from them, asking me how to proceed, should they issue a new cheque? Zounds!
Anyways, since I’d been dinged a couple times for late fees by them, I was somewhat satisfied to have cost them so much time and trouble over 37 cents, but my mind just boggled at the whole thing.
My google-fu didn’t come up with much. Apparently bulk mail rates only apply if every piece of mail is identical and not personalized. Flyers are OK, but letters to Aunt Mimi and Cousin Fred are not. You could get a bulk rate to send out your yearly “Billy got an A in woodshop!” Christmas letter, but you can’t hand-write “Mimi, how’s your goiter?” on one of them.
I would think utility bills are personalized enough to not qualify, but I bet there’s some other discount they can get.
OOOH! Very nice! 
No, businesses can use bulk rate. The personalization issue has to do with how easily the USPS machines can sort the envelope - anything that gets kicked out for a real human to deal with costs them more to handle. Bulk rates have various other requirements, like being presorted in batches by ZIP code, Carrier Route, etc. and having the bar code thingummy on there already; basically, the easier you make it for the Post Office, the better the rate you get. cite
I found it rather amusing when I got a money order in the amount of $0.01 for restitution from the state attorney. 
If they got a cheap money order from the post office it still cost someone (the thief I imagine) over $1 to pay us that penny.
If you know exactly how much your next month’s bill will be, send them now a check for that amount plus 10 cents. Then they’ll have to spend 37 cents (less presorted discount) to send you a statement showing a credit of 1 cent. Then you’ll not only be even with them but you’ll be “up” 8 cents on them. That’ll teach 'em.
I recall I had a finance company, after I’d paid final amount, chopped up the card, celebrated exuberantly and relaxed in the knowledge of a bit less debt in my life, send me a notice saying I was in credit by about 5 cents. I ignored it. Kept getting the same notice, every month. I faxed them, told them the account was closed. Still more notices.
Ended up ringing them and telling them that they had my total and absolute personal permission to use the 5 cents to go towards their office Christmas party. My treat. The woman on the other end laughed, said thank you – and the notices ceased. 
Where I used to work, a change in the way holiday pay was calculated resulted in people getting checks for amounts varying from a few cents to much more. Nothing too unusual in that. What was unusual, was that several of us got checks for 0 Cents (Due to the way the computer rounded the formula/results.
We laughed about it and went on with out lives.
Until a few months later when we got notices asking us to deposit the checks so that they could be accounted for.
Regards
FML
The last time I endend an account. I added a this payment is to cover it up to the current date. I sent it for an amount that was less than a dollar over and said no refund should be sent. I then signed it. I wasn’t going to play the couple cents back and forth game, and wanted a clean instant break from dealing with them.