Stories Earlier work, 2017
Check, please
Thousands of payment notices with pre-filled checks, so the back office stopped fixing payments
An organization sent payment notices to thousands of people at regular intervals, each letter with a blank payment check attached. People filled the check in by hand. Some got it wrong. Every wrong check was a payment somebody in the back office had to find and fix. I replaced the printing application so the check arrived filled in. The printers, the paper, the envelopes and the data stayed exactly as they were before.
- The job
- thousands of letters at regular intervals, each with a payment check
- Changed on their side
- only the application that printed
- Result
- they were satisfied, but never shared any metrics
Before
The letters were produced from a data set the organization already had, printed on their own printers onto pre-printed forms, folded and put into envelopes by the same machines. The check came along blank. If a payer wanted to pay by check, they wrote the amount and the reference themselves.
Hand-filled checks are error-prone. A wrong amount or a missing reference, and the payment lands in the wrong place or not at all. Each of those became manual work for the people receiving the payments: find it, match it, fix it, write to the payer. The payer made the error, but the sender paid for it.
What was built
The only thing that changed was the application doing the printing. It took the same data set and printed the letters as before, and it printed the amount, the reference and the QR code for electronic payment into the boxes of the check form, in the right place, thousands of times. The printers folded and stuffed as they always had. From the organization's side, the day of the print run looked the same.
After
I never saw the organization's numbers afterwards. What I know is that a check that arrives filled in can't be filled in wrong, so the wrong payments stopped, and the back office was left with only the people who didn't pay at all.
The lesson
I fix the error where it's made. Where there's no room for error, there's no error, and no missing or wrong payments to fix.
I try not to reinvent what people do. Only the application changed, and because the printing looked the same from the users' perspective, nobody had to be convinced or trained, and nothing new had to be bought.
Sometimes the boring detail has the most added value. Getting the amount and the reference into the right boxes, on every letter, can be a project.
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