Franking Machine advice please!

[Kate (newbie)]

I forgot

everytime Royal Mail puts rates up - you we have to pay £80 ish for chip which updates our machine. Had this machine 7 years now and they have NEVER ever sent us chip on time. Usually 3-4 months of calls and threats to get the chip.

[guccij]

Kate - you need to renegotiate that deal. I don't know what machine you have but you are paying over the odds. After we'd had ours for a couple of years, we got back to PB and they reduced the monthly charge to £10 + VAT ...

And do look on ebay for labels etc - Hovat is one keyword to search for. Also look at this site for supplies.

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

When my local Post Office closed in September we were forced to look at various options.
I looked and Franking Machines but was put off by the costs involved and the numerous horrer stories around franking machines.

Our best option was a Royal Mail online business account using PPI (minimum annual spend £5,000). The rates are the same as a franking machine (around 11-15% lower than standard) and no additional costs are involved (unless you want a collection).

The next step up is Packet Post (minimum 5,000 parcels per year) which is cheaper again, where you just put all the parcels into one sack per service (1st, 2nd, Airmail, ect) and weigh the lot and divide by the number of parcels to get an average and usually works out much cheaper.


Costs for a collection are £450 per year (Mon-Fri) unless you spend over £15,000 at which point the service is free.

[rmorrow]

We also use the Royal Mail OBA with packet post and a collection service and I have to say it works like a dream. You are supposed to send over 5000 packets a year to get packetpost we're not far off but spend well over £5000 a year and they've never questioned it!

The Online Business Admin (OBA) system to create your dockets is awful and can be very slow at the end of the day (doesn't even calculate your average weight - a real bugbear) BUT the whole system once set up is easy to run. Our PPI stamp is printed on our integrated invoice, peels off and hey presto - you're done! (PPI stamps are great, as the customer doesn't know how much you've spent on postage!).

Worth looking at at...

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

I agree the OBA system is poorly designed. I have a template setup and find it only takes 5-6 minutes, but if designed well I should be able to do it in under 2 minutes.

Gabe give Royal Mail a call your services are required.

[chris ashdown]

I dont understand why using OBA

We use Packetpost and we just fill in a duplicated book (posting Cheque Book) and attatch a copy to one sack of outgoing mail via a yellow plastic bag they supply

Book info only wants to know what type of mail (first, Second class etc), number of items and average weight of each type.

Takes about 30 seconds to fill in book and little man collects all each day

[grantglendinnin]

Final word on this that I originally missed:

The 'Online Postage' with Royal Mail is pretty good. The biggest - and dare I say swaying - issues are:

If your scales aren't accurate, or due to the size your scales give an inaccurate reading - the weight you enter may be wrong, thus you are under-paying and you'll get a 'Polite' letter through the post saying you owe them £X.XX to save yourself the embarrassment of your customer paying the excess postage cost.

The system often crashes and is full of bugs. You have £XX.XX in 'credit' in the system, yet several times during the week it states you have zero and can't process the online postage.

At least if you use a Franking machine, any excess costs are due to their crap weighing scales!

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

I am not sure if the hand written posting cheques method are offered to new customers anymore, I certainly wasn't offered any choice.

I personally I have never had a problem with crashed (although only been using the system for 2 1/2 months).

We are billed monthly in arrears so do not have any "credit" in the system.

[chris ashdown]

We have only been using packetpost for about 9 months so may be worth asking

We also pay monthly by direct debit

We also now use Parcel Force for larger items and have no complaints as had a great service so far

[pnagames]

1st Kate, you are being ripped off

we pay £10 +Vat on monthly charge and we have a credit account with them so we just clear it once a month ( no calls or messing around)

Labels, Viking has suitable labels which work much cheaper than PB. Ink we use to get from them but their delivery times are horrible.

2nd to the rest

we were talking to Royalmail and we were given for PPI a rate of 69p for Large letters (majority of our stuff). this is quite good considering.

However we support our local PO (we have become good friends with them) so instead of going to RM we are more likely to send everything through them (they get our post a few days of the week now and the rest is at a different PO that we have to wait at least 1 hour every day)

the willingness to do our post without causing us any trouble is the most important for us. we dropped them 8 bags yesterday of post and everything was done on time (our PO is quite busy). At the moment all PO's are after more work since they may loose another chuck of their business.

[acompton]

I wasn't sure what to do when I needed to move up from queueing at the PO, so I rang up RM Business Helpline. They asked for my posting volumes (just over £5k) and they suggested using PPI with an OBA. During the setup conversations they sometimes mentioned posting cheque books, but I think that was by accident.

So far, its worked very well. I only have to enter an average parcel weight, so scales accuracy doesn't have to be 100%. The only problem has been that the shop doesn't have a credit history and they wouldn't give me a credit account. I have a prepaid account and have to phone up to get the online order 'completed'. Timing the top-up is tricky because it requires a bank transfer - takes up to 3 days with business accounts.

Also, I've lost the ability to use Standard Parcel Service - that £4.20 band was really good value.

A one-off collection now costs £10

[parklifeclothes]

Where can you get half decent scales? what are people using? we are due to start with Royal Mail OBA next week and the ones they recommend are silly money, would outweigh the savings they are assuring us of by miles.

No longer can i be bothered to jump in car and drive to nearest P.O. going to have it collected daily.

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Scales:

We bought some digital scales around 4 years ago online (may have been ebay) for £35.

Manufacturer: Escali
Max Weight: 3000g
0.5g increments
Website: http://www.escali.com/index.html

Have found them to be very good and were always within 1-2g of the Post Office scales.

If you were worried about your scales being inaccurate you could purchase some calibrated weights (not particularly cheap), then if as long as the repeatability of the readings is consistant you would know that when the scales read 490g the true value is 500g.

If you are on packet post the accuracy is less important as you are only taking an average weight, but would need a hanging style of scales (perhaps luggage/fishing scales).

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

Like Alan stated, Standard Parcel Service is not available, although there is nothing stopping you visiting the Post Office for Standard parcels.

With PPI the rates fro 1001g-1250g is £3.65 and £1251g-1500g is £4.27, so you only really need Standard Parcels for parcel over 1500g.
1501-1750g is £4.89 so even upto 1750g only costs 69p extra and you get a faster service.

P.S. The other advantage if you send enough parcels to qualify for Packet Post is that 2nd class is available upto 2Kg (rather than the usual 1kg limit), so big savings are possible if you have a lot of parcels in the 1-2kg braket

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

One last tip:

The cost of Royal Mail Business Collections can be split between several businesses providing there is one collection point (ideal for shared buildings)