Postal Rate Commission Approves Financial Incentives for Seamless Acceptance Participants
The Postal Rate Commission (PRC) has approved the proposed new postage rates that will take effect on January 24, 2021. This includes a program to financially incentivize Mail Service Providers (MSPs) to enroll in its Seamless Acceptance Program. An incentive of $.001 per mail piece will be granted to the party submitting the electronic documentation (eDoc). That $1,000.00 per million pieces mailed is intended to help defray any additional costs the MSP might incur in transitioning into the Seamless program. The incentives will begin on January 24, 2021 as part of the new rate structure.
How to Qualify:
- All eDoc submitters who register in PostalOne!® with a Seamless Acceptance CRID and an Enterprise Payment account are eligible for the incentive.
- The Enterprise Payment account that corresponds with the permit selected during registration will receive the incentive.
- To receive the incentive, a permit that corresponds with an Enterprise Payment trust or ACH debit account must be selected. Upon postage statement finalization, Trust accounts will receive the incentive and ACH debit accounts will receive the incentive as a daily aggregate.
- When using Mail.dat: use the existing Segment Record’s (.seg) “eDoc Sender CRID” field to identify the CRID of the eDoc submitter to receive the incentive.
- When using Mail.XML: use the existing OpenMailingGroupRequest > MailingGroupData > MailingFacility field to identify the CRID of the eDoc submitter to receive the incentive.
- The mailing agent receives the incentive in Postal Wizard.
- The postage may be paid through an Enterprise Payment Account that is a different account than is used for the incentive. A non-EPS account (such as CAPS) may also be used to pay for the postage.
- To receive an EPS credit, the incentive must be $1.00 or greater.
It is important to note that this incentive program will not impact the USPS’s intention to require:
- Mailers with authorized DMUs, as a condition of their DMU authorization, to participate in Seamless Acceptance by May 1, 2021; and
- Full-Service mailings entered at BMEUs to begin to be verified using only automated sampling and verification processes on July 1, 2021.
Other Benefits of Seamless Acceptance
In addition to these new financial incentives, Mailing Service Providers can benefit in other ways by moving into the Seamless Acceptance program. By eliminating the time-consuming, manual verification and acceptance procedures at DMUs and BMEUs, MSPs can more efficiently schedule their printing and production processes.
Mail can be loaded immediately onto the trucks, saving the time and space of storing the mail for verification. Staffing, production equipment, and other resources can be scheduled more accurately and reliably to increase productivity and cut costs. The customers of the MSP, the mail owners, can also benefit from more predictable delivery dates as well as a reduction in undeliverable pieces.
However, until these longer-term benefits are being realized by MSPs, the incentive program recently approved by the PRC for Seamless participants will go a long way toward driving more mail into the Seamless Acceptance program and that is good news for the entire mailing industry.
Assurety is making a special offer to help you become compliant with Seamless Acceptance
If you are an operation or plant manager at a small to midsized Mail Service Provider (MSP) who has been given increasing responsibilities with less staff, you can benefit from Assurety’s solution for Seamless Acceptance. You can check Assurety’s Seamless offer here.
