While paying with mailed checks is a useful option to have, mailing in payments does have its drawbacks. With the option to pay with a bank account—using the same two numbers found on the front of a check—mailing in a check may be a thing of the past. 

Below are a few reasons why we recommend bank account payments over mailed checks.

Before we can process your check, it must make its journey to our office. This requires manually writing and handing the check to a mail service, and often takes a week or more for delivery. If you're waiting to set up your domain for the first time or if you are drawing nearer to your payment's due date, this delay could be an issue.

Bank account payments typically process in as little as 3 business days, making them several days faster than mailed checks, on average.

Being fully automatic, bank account payments are about as convenient as paying with a credit/debit card. Our system will automatically initiate payments on the due date, rather than having to ensure someone writes a new check each billing cycle. With board members changing from year-to-year, we find that communities sometimes forget to mail in checks, which can result in unexpected lapses in your subscription.

Over the years we've found that other issues can crop up with mailed checks—like missing signatures, typos, physical damages, and misprints.

With regular USPS mail, there's no way to track when your payment will arrive at our office or where it eventually ended up.

While rare, it's possible that your check will be lost or misplaced by the mail service. Since checks contain your bank account's routing and account numbers, mailing a check can be riskier than you might think.

On the other hand, automatic bank account payments use the same two numbers, but they're provided in a much more secure fashion. In fact, just like our online payments platform, sensitive details like bank account numbers never touch our system—they're handled entirely by our payment processor.

With checks, we know when a check arrives at our office, but we don't have insight into the full process from start to finish. With bank account payments, though, we do. This enables our team and our interface to provide more details and clarity regarding the status of a bank account payment.