Sending a check for $0.00 usually doesn’t work. What usually causes this is thatthere is a fractional cent balance on the account that doesn’t show up on the billing statement. If you enter a zero dollar payment, that doesn’t satisfy the balance, if the accounting system will even accept it.
The correct procedure is to make a $1 payment and then request a credit for the excess credit balance.
Dan, no, no, that is not nearly mischievious enough.
If you owe a fraction of one cent, then send them a check for one penny. then demand the refund! Or you will sue! Then the cost to comply is literally greater than the debt itself.
but actually great job explaining what is otherwise inexplicable. i mean its stupid either way, but now we know the precise mechanics of the stupidity.
Yep. Some moron in IT forgot to program in a round-off routine. That in itself should be actionable against the creditor. Probably not enough money in it to generate a filing mill industry, though.
Don’t blame IT for this, blame finance… We (I work in IT) typically get told to calculate all amounts to 5 (or more) decimals for all internal computations, then round that down to 2 decimals for printing. So internally, because of business rules not set by us, we work with $0.00014 to be settled, which ends up being a bill for $0.00 on your doorstep.
Now, we try to get it into peoples’ heads to be a bit smarter about that and discard such amounts when they pop up that would result in $0.00 bills, but not every business owner/analyst understands that. He only sees his balance sheet, which somehow has to explain a missing 0.01 cent. In his reasoning, a million bills of each 0.01 cent are still a lot of money, so he insists they’re all counted exactly.
The receiver of the bill could file a class action suit in which the class each receives a coupon for $0.00 and the lawyers make millions!
On the serious side, I worked for a bank IT dept. that would not require payment of credit card bills if the balance was under $1.00 (and charged no interest on that amount). They correctly figured that the cost of processing was greater than the amount of the payment. They did include the small balance the next time the bill exceeded $1.
My father had or still has a collection of checks for five and ten cents, mostly for refunds from the Phone company. He reckons that the fouling up of their accounting is worth far more amusement that the total of seventy or eighty cents he might walk away from the bank with.
My last semester in college in 1982, somehow the University determined that they overcharged me six cents. After graduation, Uncle Sam shipped me all over the country, then overseas. Of course all the automatic mail generated trying to refund six cents stayed 1 step behind me. Eventually the sum was turned over to the state, and in 1988 I received a check for six cents. Of course I never cashed it; it is just too much fun to think how many bureaucrats got paid to grind that paltry sum through all those systems.
7 Comments
Sending a check for $0.00 usually doesn’t work. What usually causes this is thatthere is a fractional cent balance on the account that doesn’t show up on the billing statement. If you enter a zero dollar payment, that doesn’t satisfy the balance, if the accounting system will even accept it.
The correct procedure is to make a $1 payment and then request a credit for the excess credit balance.
Dan, no, no, that is not nearly mischievious enough.
If you owe a fraction of one cent, then send them a check for one penny. then demand the refund! Or you will sue! Then the cost to comply is literally greater than the debt itself.
but actually great job explaining what is otherwise inexplicable. i mean its stupid either way, but now we know the precise mechanics of the stupidity.
Yep. Some moron in IT forgot to program in a round-off routine. That in itself should be actionable against the creditor. Probably not enough money in it to generate a filing mill industry, though.
Don’t blame IT for this, blame finance…
We (I work in IT) typically get told to calculate all amounts to 5 (or more) decimals for all internal computations, then round that down to 2 decimals for printing.
So internally, because of business rules not set by us, we work with $0.00014 to be settled, which ends up being a bill for $0.00 on your doorstep.
Now, we try to get it into peoples’ heads to be a bit smarter about that and discard such amounts when they pop up that would result in $0.00 bills, but not every business owner/analyst understands that.
He only sees his balance sheet, which somehow has to explain a missing 0.01 cent.
In his reasoning, a million bills of each 0.01 cent are still a lot of money, so he insists they’re all counted exactly.
Don’t you love modern technology đŸ™‚
The receiver of the bill could file a class action suit in which the class each receives a coupon for $0.00 and the lawyers make millions!
On the serious side, I worked for a bank IT dept. that would not require payment of credit card bills if the balance was under $1.00 (and charged no interest on that amount). They correctly figured that the cost of processing was greater than the amount of the payment. They did include the small balance the next time the bill exceeded $1.
My father had or still has a collection of checks for five and ten cents, mostly for refunds from the Phone company. He reckons that the fouling up of their accounting is worth far more amusement that the total of seventy or eighty cents he might walk away from the bank with.
Bob
My last semester in college in 1982, somehow the University determined that they overcharged me six cents. After graduation, Uncle Sam shipped me all over the country, then overseas. Of course all the automatic mail generated trying to refund six cents stayed 1 step behind me.
Eventually the sum was turned over to the state, and in 1988 I received a check for six cents. Of course I never cashed it; it is just too much fun to think how many bureaucrats got paid to grind that paltry sum through all those systems.