Studios moving away from accepting checks for film rent payments

[Mike Blakesley]

Another era is ending. Since I began my theater owning career, I've paid 100% of my film rental by mailing in checks to the studios. Now Warner Bros. has introduced a new web portal through which you can pay via ACH. I guess it'll save about a buck each time, considering the postage, check, envelope and ink.

I'm sure the other studios will follow this in quick succession. (If any actually have, please contribute their web address on this thread.

Warners' address is theatrical.warnerbros.com.

[Frank Cox]

I've been paying all of the movie companies other than Cineplex by EFT for years. I pay Cineplex using my credit card.

It's very convenient and there's no chance of a cheque getting lost somewhere.

[Martin McCaffery]

As far as I know WB hasn't stopped taking checks, just offering another option. Many of the distributors offer ACH payments, though this is the first I've heard of one providing a portal.
Going to stick with checks for the time being because I like having written records.

[James Wyrembelski]

I was told WB is not accepting checks at all starting Oct, 7th.

Wire transfers and ACH only.

I dislike this as I also like having the written record on hand.

[Frank Cox]

I do EFT payments through my bank's website and one of the things you can do after hitting "send" is "print transaction record". So I print that to a pdf file and then I have something I can email to anyone who might need it.

[Mike Blakesley]

I like checks mainly because it's the simplest process. At the end of the week, I punch the film rental into Quickbooks with any other bills we may have. Then when I go to pay bills, it presents me with a list of bills to be paid. I select the ones I want to pay and print the checks. It's pretty seamless and is now enshrined in my records forever. And I only had to enter the dollar amount once.

With the new modern "simpler process," I now have to:

1. Go to a website and log in (and these big companies can't ever let a website sit there and work; they are always changing this or that or "redesigning it to be more mobile friendly," resulting in confusion for the user)
2. Navigate to wherever the payment screen is (with WB it's 3 or 4 screens deep)
3. Type in the amount I want to pay
4. Go through two "confirmation" screens to finalize it
5. Print a receipt so I have my written record
6. Log out of the website
7. Go into my Quickbooks and enter the ACH payment there

At my job, I am constantly getting interrupted. Either people come in, or I get texts, emails or calls. I can be in my office alone at night and things still happen. For me to ever have more than five minutes without something coming up is rare. So if something happens in the middle of the above process, that's where mistakes creep in.

I'm happy to save the stamps, but other than that they have created more work for me (and less for them, go figure).

As far as I know WB hasn't stopped taking checks, just offering another option

I can't remember where I saw the notice. I thought it was an email, but I looked through all my emails and can't find it. I was thinking I had dreamed it until I saw James's post above. Thanks James for proving I'm not crazy.

[Scott Norwood]

I will never understand why companies will make it difficult for people to give them money.

[James Wyrembelski]

And not all banking institutions are created equal. We have one bank left in our town (Huntington) and their payment systems absolutely suck.

I just had to send an ACH for the license to Carrie. (Since they have no payment option for check). So, this was my first time using their system. I had to spend about 2 hours at the bank to set it up. (Couldnt do this over the phone per instructions of the bank). Finally get things set up and of course they don't provide any kind of confirmation other than a number that you can see on the site. Not even an email simply saying "Yep, it went through!" I NEED the actual copy to send to our booking agency and to the license company. So, I'll have to go back up to ask where I can get a simple statement showing payment confirmation.

Since this is not available on my online banking I'll probably have to do this every single time for WB.

Of course, I could wire the money at 50 bucks a pop. Not happening.


I still like the check system. Takes 2 seconds to write and send. Our booking agency also collects the payment first for record keeping and then sends it off to the appropriate receiver. Also nice since it's double confirmed that payments are made and made on time.

[Mike Blakesley]

As I alluded to above, it's all about creating less work for them. The ACH way, the money drops into the bank and their system probably updates your account all automatically. No need for a mistake prone human clerk to do it. They probably have (or will) trim their bookkeeping staff down to one or two trouble shooters who'll go in and fix screwups and lay off the rest.

The only reason I say the above is because my sister used to work in the bookkeeping department at our parts store brand's parent company. They closed the local receivables department and consolidated the whole whole works into one location, and trimmed several hundred jobs. At the exact same time, they stopped taking checks. If a store has the affrontery to say "We are not going to use the ACH, we intend to send checks instead," they'll just stop servicing that store.

[Martin McCaffery]

Just booked a film with WB Classics and it still says to send checks to (in our case) Atlanta. I guess the disease hasn't spread.

[James Wyrembelski]

The amazing part too, is that for many ACH still charges you although less than wiring the money. Luckily our bank allows ACH payments at no charge since we qualify as a truly small business. However, for those that don't qualify for the "special" small business banking you need to pay for the service in a monthly fee.

If I had to "upgrade" my banking and pay for the privilege to send WB money I'd consider taking them off service unless the fee was compensated somehow. But I doubt anyone would care. 1.00 for a check doesn't seem so bad in the end.

[Mike Blakesley]

Especially when you add in the 73 cents postage (or whatever it costs this week).

[Harold Hallikainen]

Our credit union has a free "bill payer" service. Most of the vendors we pay accept electronic payments (which I assume are ACH). For those that don't, they mail a check. I do keep track of stuff in QuickBooks, so I have to enter stuff twice, once in the credit union web site and again in QuickBooks. It's not too terrible, though.

[Frank Cox]

For bill paying and transactions in the US I have an account with RBC Bank, which is a US bank and a division of the Royal Bank of Canada.

When I first signed up for my US account I assumed they did some kind of electronic payments since I pay bills there by going to one of their webpages.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that they actually print and mail cheques to the payees. Whenever I set up a new payee they need the name and the mailing address, and they put a cheque in the mail when I enter a payment to be made.

It seems so low-tech when I compare it to the RBC service in Canada, where I enter a payment on their website and it's just deposited into the payee's account. Especially when it's the same bank.

[Mike Blakesley]

At my store, we have a couple dozen customers who routinely "pay online." But we still get a check in the mail.

We only have one account that actually does an ACH payment, which I find out about it through an email from the customer. Then I get another email from the bank a couple of days later, saying the money's in actually the bank. Then I have to post it to the customer's account, and then enter it in quickbooks as a separate deposit. If they would just walk in and hand me a check, it'd get posted on their account immediately and deposited with the rest of the day's business. So ACH takes a two step process that takes 30 seconds and turns it into four steps spread out over several days. So much for technology making things simpler.