As has been documented over the last 10 months I have been working as a self employed contractor doing Internet Marketing for a couple of apartment complexes, one in Oklahoma City and another here in Wichita. But recently I have been employed full time by the management company that runs the property here in Wichita and I am extremely happy with that situation, I still get to work from home which maximizes my income as I don’t need to pay for babysitters or travel costs.
Right, so the problem is with the (nameless) property in Oklahoma City, but before I continue I stress that it’s not the owner of the property that is the issue, it’s the management company who he hired to run the apartment complex. Almost every month I have been paid late, sometimes as late as two weeks and this month, it was three weeks late and then they even screwed that payment up.
How did they screw up you ask? well when I invoice I specifically instruct them to make the check payable to my personal name but instead they made it payable to my company name. Which is not actually a company name as I am a sole trader, it’s just my website URL. End result, I could not cash the check, but it was accepted by my bank, who I will name, MERITRUST CREDIT UNION; and funds made available despite the check not being in my personal name, more on that in a moment.
MERITRUST CREDIT UNION, have an online system, which allows you to scan your check and submit it online which is great, saves me a trip to the bank, but it has a HUGE flaw, it allows check to go through and funds made available regardless of what name the check is made out to. But days later after you have likely spent some or all of the funds, they say, actually you cant have the funds because of blah, blah, blah when reviewed. It allows you to acknowledge that the name is not your name via a checkbox, then allows it to go through and releases funds until reviewed by a human.
The net result is that we are now almost $280 overdrawn because the funds have been revoked two days after the fact when we had already spent $350 of the check amount on some things we needed.
Now listen up MERITRUST, if there is any doubt about the payee name, hold the check and don’t release funds until reviewed, so your customers don’t think they have funds when in reality they dont. If that’s too complicated for your web developers to implement, hold all checks until reviewed, just add a note explaining that and to go to a branch to cash their check quicker.
This cacophony of incompetence has led to us having to manage on ZERO money until Friday, I don’t have the money to pay for my son’s school lunches, it’s touch and go whether we have enough gas in the cars for my wife to get to and from work and we will be getting hit with a $50 fine because a debt repayment installment will have been rejected, all because of an incompetent management company and a bank with no forward thinking abilities, but all in all, it could have been worse!