Householding & Document Consolidation

Householding & Document Consolidation: Overview

In today’s environment of electronic billing and online statements, many customers still prefer to receive paper statements and reports via US mail. Unfortunately, the volume of mail is going up and the cost to send each mail piece is going up. We know that companies who produce mail are always looking for ways to lower their printing and mailing costs.

In particular, companies in high-volume service fields (banking, brokerage, credit lenders, insurance, etc.) often have customers with multiple accounts. Multiple accounts often mean multiple mailings. Is it possible to combine all those documents into a single mail piece, instantly saving many thousands of dollars in wasted mail costs? Yes: householding is the answer. Instead of mailing each statement or correspondence piece individually, householding combines all information into a single envelope; instantly enhancing mail generation and controlling postage costs. Let’s say your company normally sends out three communications at the end of the month to the average customer. By combining those three communications into a single two-ounce mailing, you can cut postage costs by more than 54 percent!

Householding & Document Consolidation:  Challenges  

While the concept of householding is straightforward, you may be asking yourself whether it is possible to incorporate such a system without disrupting current mail volume. This is an understandable issue for anyone seeking to implement a householding solution. Perhaps your company has been generating statements and reports for years—sometimes decades—without disruption within a stable workflow and environment. Therefore, any householding system you choose must be able to utilize existing workflow without costly interruptions.

Householding & Document Consolidation:  Barr Systems' Solutions

We know how to apply a householding system without disturbing the existing infrastructure. Householding is done on the print spooler side, before the ink meets the paper. The print jobs enter the spooler and the data within the printstream is indexed and classified along defined criteria such as postal data, account number, or nearly any other element you require. Once all of the jobs have been received from the host, the data can then be bundled according to the criteria defined. The resulting output contains all the pieces to be delivered to each postal stop.

Some of the benefits of Barr’s householding solution:

• Perform householding processes on the print-ready files created by your existing applications without disrupting your underlying operations or mission-critical systems.
• Eliminate duplicate statement inserts or announcements that result in wasted paper
• Save on postal fees. The cost for each additional ounce of First-Class Mail®, including letters, flats and postcards, will decrease by approximately seven cents per piece.
• Realize even more postal savings. Outputted jobs can contain pieces pre-sorted along postal codes to reduce postal rates.