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Why your checks may still be in the mail!
 Incorrect zip codes, misspelled
cities, invalid state codes may keep your vendor payments from being
delivered. Up to 95 percent of the addresses in the typical company’s
vendor file do not conform to postal service addressing guidelines
and the impact can be costly. When checks don’t arrive at
their intended destination, vendors start calling, discounts may
be lost, costs may be incurred investigating and reprocessing payments,
and you may even incur charges for placing a stop payment. Worse,
if you don’t realize that a check was never cashed, you may
eventually have to escheat the total amount of the check to the
state with the possibility of penalties and interest, if you don’t
follow proper notification guidelines. According to IOMA’s
2003 Benchmarking study, 2.5% of all vendor checks are reissued.
With the average vendor check between $1,000 and $5,000, the dollar
exposure is enormous.
The fact that virtually all of your outgoing mail does get delivered
to the intended recipient is a testament to the processes that the
United States Postal Service (USPS) has put in place. However, you
can improve delivery accuracy and timeliness by following the addressing
guidelines that the USPS and other Postal Authorities have developed.
When you look at your vendor master file, you can typically specify
one or more lines of name information, one or more lines of address
information as well as City, State and Zip Code.
When the USPS looks at your mail, they are mainly interested in
the address. Some of the information that you may think is part
of the address is ignored by the USPS.
What’s an Address?
The USPS defines a Complete Address to be an address that includes
all of the necessary elements to obtain an exact match with the
USPS ZIP+4 and City State files. Despite what your system may allow,
a USPS Complete Address consists of two lines: a Delivery Address
Line and a Last Line. A foreign address has a third line that contains
only the name of the country. A Complete Address should never include
any special characters or punctuation other than a hyphen within
a ZIP+4, a slash or hyphen in a street address, or a # as part of
a secondary address.
Delivery Address Line
A Delivery Address Line typically has either a Street Address or
a PO Box. Some less frequently used types of Delivery Addresses
are Military, Rural Route, Highway Contract Route, General Delivery
and Puerto Rico addresses.
PO Boxes
PO Box addresses should always be set up as PO BOX followed by the
box number or letter. Avoid placing a # after PO BOX.
Table 1 - Street Address Rules
Primary Address Numbers (a/k/a Street Numbers, should always
be numeric; i.e. 1 rather than ONE.
Predirectionals and Postdirectionals that are part of a Delivery
Address Line (North, South, East, West, etc.) should be abbreviated
to N, S, E, W, NE, NW, SE, and SW.
Street Names that are numbers should be written as numeric;
i.e. 1ST rather than FIRST.
Street Suffixes should be abbreviated. Common suffix abbreviations
are listed in Table 2.
Secondary Address information (Suite, Floor, etc.) should
appear at the end of the Street should be standardized. Standard
Secondary address abbreviations are listed in Table 3 |
Street Addresses
Using USPS terminology, Street Addresses are made up of a Primary
Address Number, a Predirectional, a Street Name, a Street Suffix,
a Postdirectional, a Secondary Address Identifier and a Secondary
Address Range. The rules for each of these components are in Table
1.
Avoid placing a # between the Secondary Address Identifier and
the alphanumeric code (letters and/or numbers) that specifies the
Secondary Address Range. When there is no Secondary Address Identifier
but there is a Secondary Address Range, a # should be used. Examples
of Secondary Addresses that conform to these guidelines are: APT
6, RM A, FL 3, # 6.
Last Line
The Last Line of an address should always contain the name of the
City, followed by 1 space, followed by the 2 character USPS State
Code, followed by 1 space followed by either a 5 digit ZIP Code
or a 5-4 ZIP+4 Code.
| Table 2 - Street
Suffix Abbreviations |
Street Suffix |
Abbreviation |
AVENUE |
AVE |
BOULEVARD |
BLVD |
CANYON |
CYN |
COURT |
CT |
CROSSING |
XING |
DRIVE |
DR |
EXPRESSWAY |
EXPY |
FREEWAY |
FWY |
HIGHWAY |
HWY |
JUNCTION |
JCT |
LANE |
LN |
PARKWAY |
PKWY |
ROAD |
RD |
ROUTE |
RTE |
SQUARE |
SQ |
STREET |
ST |
TURNPIKE |
TPKE |
Additional Street Suffix abbreviations
can be found in USPS Publication 28. |
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Unlike Street Directionals which the USPS wants you to abbreviate
with a single letter, when the name of a city includes a directional
(e.g. EAST), the USPS prefers it to be spelled out in full. The
USPS also prefers words such as SAINT and FORT to be spelled out
rather than abbreviated as ST or FT.
Other Information
Other information that may be in your vendor file such as an Account
Number, Attention, Care of Name, Department Name, Department Number,
File Number, Private Mail Box or Mail Stop, should be placed after
the Name and before the Delivery Address Line.
If you have an address with both a Street Address and a PO Box,
it is known as a Dual Address. Dual Addresses should be avoided.
When unavoidable, the Last Line should always include the City,
State and ZIP information associated with the second of the two
addresses.
Table 3 - Secondary
Address Identifiers |
Secondary Address |
Use |
SUITE |
STE |
APARTMENT |
APT |
BUILDING |
BLDG |
ROOM |
RM |
UNIT |
UNIT |
FLOOR |
FL |
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When In Doubt
The USPS web site can be used to verify the Official Postal format
for an address. The complete USPS guidelines are in Publication
28 available on the US Postal Service web site, www.usps.com.
International address guidelines for most countries are available
on the Universal Postal Union web site, www.upu.int.
RECAP’s Vendor Management Services
As part of RECAP’s Vendor Management Services, we can analyze
your vendor file address information and update it to conform to
USPS addressing guidelines and augment the data to include ZIP+4.
We can also validate your address information against USPS databases.
RECAP can also provide you with recommendation regarding vendor
naming conventions specific to the vendors in your vendor file.
We can also update vendor names to conform to those naming conventions
and customized naming conventions.
For more information
about RECAP or its services,
please send e-mail to info@recapinc.com
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