Do Us a Favor: Please Switch Away from Checks (or Bank Bill Pay) when paying LCWA

Hi all, we’ve studied our payment processing efforts recently and we have learned one big lesson: We really want all members to switch their monthly payments to either credit card or debit card—if you can manage it. Instead of using personal checks or your bank bill-pay system.

Here’s why: paper checks cost LCWA much more money and volunteer handling time to process than a card payment. A lot more. And with nearly 800 members, that is really adding up for us. Plus, it’s very hard to track down missing payments if they are made by check. And finally, USPS snail mail is getting slower and slower, so more checks “paid on time” are actually arriving late (triggering you getting a late payment notice from us).

Why should you care about all that? Well, we’ve been trying to keep our internet prices low, so anything you can do to help really helps you in the long run. Plus, we have a limited number of members stepping up as volunteers; those that do are getting burned out. And I’m sure you would agree that it’s much better to be spending our money on keeping the quality and speed of your internet connection reliable rather than on high-maintenance administration functions like processing checks.

What about your bank’s bill pay? You may not realize it, but your bank’s bill pay system actually sends us a paper check, so we still experience paper check handling and tracking issues. We’d like you to switch off bill pay too.

How do you switch your LCWA payment to credit or debit cards? It’s easy. When you get your next email LCWA invoice, simply click the payment link inside the email. Then enter the credit card or debit card on the secure webpage that pops up. That’s it!

Autopay can be set up on that same page. For autopay, you simply leave the autopay checkbox at the bottom of that payment page selected, and all payments going forward will be made automatically.

Note, in our new payment system, you can use debit cards anywhere a credit card is requested. And I assume you know this: a debit card is really the same as writing a check—it draws from the same place checks and bill pay draws. But we don’t have to handle a paper check.

So please help your community volunteer-run La Canada Wireless Association, and help our volunteers, and consider switching your payments to credit or debit card. We’d really appreciate it.

Questions? Send an email to billing.help@lcwireless.net, we’d be delighted to help.