Two Steps Backward

The company I contract for has been in business in Chicago for many decades. The companys has 100'000s of local customers that are billed monthly. The company has made and continue to make a strong push to get our customers signed up to pay us electronically. Currently whena customer bounces a check for a payment our bank informs us via an electronic file. We use that file to produce a paper report and the NSF checks have to be enterred into our system manually. For about 6 months now the department that processes payments have been requesting that the computer department modify the nonsufficient funds processing be automated. It hasn't been done yet because the big wigs haven't seen fit to schedule it around other projects.

A couple of years ago the company was purchased by another out of state company. In the past couple of weeks our not-so-new corporate over lords have told us that we will have to start processing Nonsufficient funds for electronic payments via FAX. As it has been explained to me, we have not choice in the matter because the vendor that will be processing the electronic payments did not build a mechanism to give us electronic notification of NSF payments.