Postal rates will change again effective January 22, 2017.
Chronicle of Philanthropy reports New Postal Rates Will Boost Costs for Charities. Article says increase for charities will range from 2.8% up to 4.3%.
A significant change is that mail which was previously marked as “standard” will now be categorized and marked as “marketing mail.” That is a concern for an industry representative who said that may reduce the likelihood of recipients actually opening such items, which would obviously reduce the effectiveness of a mailing.
You can find the new rates at the USPS site: January 2017 Price Change.
If you open the excel version of the new rates, found here, you can then find the retail rates on the tab called “”FCM & EDDM – Retail.”
You will also notice about 35 other tabs. I send such a small amount of mail that my only experience is with the retail rates. Consider the complexity of sending lots of mail. Doing so requires knowing lot of regulations and understanding which of the hundreds of price points apply to this particular shipment on a particular day.
Charities that send enough mail to have a mail department already know about the January changes. Most of the charities I work with don’t send that much mail so they may find out about the random changes in postage rates the same way I do, namely reading about it on the ‘net. So I hope this post helps the vast number of smaller charities.
Same idea for most CPAs. Thus I will post this on both of my main blogs.