Coyote Blog

The last few days I have written of my frustration at trying to get local business bank accounts, the sole purpose of which is to accept deposits of cash from my local campgrounds and then transfer that money to my main account.  This is a major hassle as opening a bank account as a corporation is not a simple task and, as I have found out, some banks won't even accept this sort of business.

Here is what I need:  I need a national network of offices, many in rural locations, that will take my cash and ACH (a cheap form of wire transfer) the money to my bank account.  So naturally, I think of Walmart.  Walmart already is used to handling a lot of cash and Walmart is already starting to offer a number of consumer banking services.  One reader told me about the Bluebird service, a joint effort between Amex and Walmart to create a sort of virtual consumer bank.  I love the idea, but it has rules limiting it to consumer accounts.

So here is my business for you Walmart

• I bring my cash to you at any store.  You zip it through a counter.  We agree on the amount.
• You wire my main account with the money.  I will give you three days so you can use the cheapest transfer and have time to get the cash into your own account.
• I will pay you 100 bp (1%) of the cash value for the service

Currently I pay merchant processors 270-300bp for those transactions and I have to wait 3-5 days for the money to hit my accounts.  So 100bp on cash would be fair for me, and I would guess fair for Walmart.

A while back I wrote on my concerns about privacy and being treated like a criminal in opening new business banking accounts in small town California.  My main bank closed so I had to go with the available local bank El Dorado.  Now El Dorado Bank refuses to take my business and open new accounts.  It could be because I criticized them online, but they say it is because they no longer take accounts that are just deposit accounts, ie accounts where we drop our local cash collections and then ACH it from time to time to our other accounts.

I guess I understand why this is not awesome business for them, but on the other hand all they have to do is make 4 deposits a month and they get to carry my $20,000 average balance and charge me a fee as well.  And they still don't want the business.

Here is what I need.  I need some easy way around the country, often in rural locations, I can turn cash into bits.  I can now scan checks anywhere in the country at my desk and have the check deposited to my account.  But not so with cash.   You still have to find someone local who will accept the cash into an account, effectively turning the cash into bits and bytes that I can then transfer to my main bank.  I don't think there is a solution to this but you are welcome to email me if you know of one.  My guess that anyone who tried to start such a service would be immediately hamstrung by the government who believes in its heart that every one of us is a drug dealer, money laundering, or tax evader, or all of the above.

If your business is like mine, a lot of folks to whom I owe money are insisting on the ability to automatically remove the money I owe them each month from our checking account (via an electronic process known as ACH, which is slower but much cheaper and easier to use than the old wire transfer method).  At first, any loan I took out insisted that the lender be able to automatically withdraw my payments.  Then my workers compensation company.  Then certain vendor accounts.  And of course my merchant processing companies are constantly shoving money in and out of my bank accounts.

In retrospect, I was far too sanguine about this situation.  What finally caused me to abandon my sense of security was a libel lawsuit filed by one of my vendors over a bad review I wrote of their product [I won't mention the name here but I am sure anyone can figure it out with a simple search].  Anyway, I realized that this company, who was suing me for untold bazillions of dollars, actually had the right to freely jack whatever they wanted out of my checking account.  What is worse, this same company is being sued by many companies for trying to take an arbitrarily high final payment out of their accounts at contract termination.  Eeek!  And this does not even include the possibility of outright fraud.  I have ACH tools where if I have your bank's name and your account number, I could pull out money from your account without your ever knowing about it until you see it missing.  I presume criminals could do the same thing.

Something had to be done, and it turned out that my bank, Bank of America, has something called ACH positive pay wherein nothing gets ACH'ed out of my accounts without my first approving the payments.   I check a screen each morning and in 60 seconds can do the approvals for the day.  They also have a very easy to use rules system where one can set up rules such that payments to certain vendors or for certain amounts don't need further daily approvals.

I presume most major banks have a similar product.  It cost me some money but I feel way safer and encourage you to look into it if you are in the same situation.

I just encountered my second major piece of software used by Bank of America for my business accounts that will only work with Internet Explorer and most definitely will not work with Chrome.  Their ACH/Treasury/Direct Payments system has to run on Internet Explorer (only) and now I find their secure email system that sends me all my merchant account notices does not work on Chrome and only works on IE.

I am just waiting for the moment that a Bank of America tech support person tells me I have to use Netscape.