The Long Shadow of Checks

Not for me. I live in Norway. I suddenly became an absent party of a class action lawsuit in the USA. The settlement came in the form of a check. A small amount, maybe around $50. But the cost of cashing it in Norway was more than the value!

  Charitable donations - Many charities maximize every penny, and electronic contributions eat into that.

  Paying my accountant - Good accountants make every penny count, and aren't interested in tithing from their revenue to credit card companies.

  Tipping the paper boy

  Tipping the doorman (Though recently, I've switched to cash for this, as it looks better in a Christmas card)

  Business license renewal in certain cities

  Some of my recent real estate transactions have required checks to be written to various local authorities, county clerks, etc.

  Making IRS payments without a fee

  Paying the gas bill.  My gas company charges $5+ to pay by credit or debit card.

  Paying the rent.  My building's management company charges $20 + a percentage to pay by debit card, or $50 + a percentage to pay by credit card.  If I pay my bill with a check, there's no surcharge. If I pay by credit card, I have to pay another $113.

  Paying the electric bill.  The electric company charges $5+ to pay by credit or debit card.

  Passport renewal fee.  Renewing a passport by mail in the United States *requires* a check or a money order.

It works like this: receive invoice, wait until due date, write a check dated for the due date, wait a few days, send it through regular mail, and complain about the past due notices because "I've already sent the payment!! Did you lose it or something?" Applying late fees doesn't work either, they'll just send a late payment again without the late fee included.

At first, I genuinely thought it was because they preferred checks for record keeping purposes, but when I set up echeck and told them how they just need to call us and give us the check number to pay. Or they can just enter their information at our payment processor's portal. Nope! It's "insecure" (Sir/Madam, you're sending me a piece of paper with your bank account and routing number and it's going through the mailing system where mail gets lost...). For that same reason, they don't want to pay with a card either.

That's why the cost of paying the transaction fees for card processing is so worth it to me. I got the check scanner years before the COVID lockdowns to speed things up, but nothing beats the sometimes instant card settlement deposits. I still accept checks from responsible, timely payors, but stop doing business with anyone who has a pattern of paying late with checks. It's not worth the additional work to get them to pay (there's truly no way to know what their intent is - are their lateness predictable or is this the month they're going to wait 45 days to pay?). I'm fine with letting someone else wait for them to pay late.

One thing that still seems to be missing from bank cards is the lack of ability to add your own identifier (namely the check number) to the transaction at time of payment. I understand that, for responsible payors, this is why they might prefer paying with checks - you not only get a reference number, a memo line, and a date that makes sense for your own internal system. Even with bank cards, the date of the transaction is sometimes not the date that it actually happened, which can be confusing for record association. Zelle has a memo entry, but the reference identifiers are letters and numbers, ew. An internal auto incrementing number to identify transactions would be really useful.

Anyway, hopefully paper checks will be phased out. Although I do still find them useful for interbank account transfers - the Zelle multi-account trick still makes me kind of queasy.

For example, payroll - there's literally no reason your employer needs to store your account and routing number as another piece of your personal info that they can lose when some hacker finds out their MySQL admin password is "admin"

Like, the system should be that you give your employer your banks name, plus a UUID associated with your account that allows entitys to deposit but not withdraw funds for you account. It would be trivial to implement and make things much more secure, but instead we're stuck with the account+routing number system that's basically paper checks but put on a computer.