Site News and System Status

This page is designed to inform our customers of all current up to the minute Billing Pros system status, system issues, changes, updates and important must read customer information.

1/23/12 New Postage Rate Increase 1-22-12. Since 1998 we have never raised the cost to our smaller customers even though the United States Postal Service has increased their 1st class stamp cost many, many times. If your Billing Pros mailing rate is at $1.29 (our maximum rate) you will not see any increase in your mailing costs!.

12/26/11 Your Last Billing and Mailing Completion E-Mail for 2011. Don't forget to keep and print your last Billing and Mailing Completion E-mail for your taxes.

11/19/11 United States Postal Service to Increase Mailing Rates January 22, 2012. This mailing rate increase will affect all of our customers starting January 22, 2012.
1st Class (1 oz.) – 1 cent increase to 45 cents
Standard Mail (and Non-Profit) - 1.476 cents
Letters to Canada or Mexico (1 oz.) – 5-cent increase to 85 cents
Letters to Other Countries – 7-cent increase to $1.05

4/17/11 50 Cent Email-Billing De-Bugging Completed. We have spent another full day completely de-bugging the 50 cent email billing function and finally feel its 100% de-bugged. If you are email billing more than paper billing you will automatically be set to paid email billing... you should make sure we have your payment page link or web address set up in your email billing so you can accept online payments. Your customers will see "to pay by credit card click here". Users that are within the 50% guidelines will not notice any difference in their email billing function.

4/9/11 Sending More Email Billing Than Paper Billing? We now offer 100% Email Billing with No Paper Billing and Mailing required. In the beginning we strictly designed the Billing Pros online billing and mailing system to focus on paper billing and mailing with the ability to also send email bills. We have always offered free email billing as long as there is a minimum of 50% paper billing and mailing also being used. We have found many customers are sending email billing in excess of the 50-50 percent required for free email billing. When this happens we are basically using our own money to cover a customers mailing expense. In the last several months we have spent many hours designing, writing code and testing to fix this issue. We now have the ability to set specific customers who send way more email bills than paper bills to a cost per email bill charge of 50 cents. Payments are made through PayPal's safe and secure payment page. We have now implemented this new charge per email billing service. Although we have tested, tested and tested this is a totally new feature and some one may encounter a problem. If any problem is found our if we can just do anything to make this new feature even better... please do not hesitate to call the office. The bulk of our customers will not notice any change to their email billing needs only customers who exceed the 50-50 percent.

1/18/11 Have You Changed Your Phone Number Or Email Address?. We just had a customer who has been using or services for several years. They use our online billing and mailing program and failed to notify us of their new email address and phone number in which they changed over 11 months ago. They had no balance when they sent us their Billing and Mailing request,..so, we "Did Not"! send out their billing and mailing. We emailed them twice with the "Billing and Mailing Denied" email but no response. We then called them and their number was no longer correct. 1 Month later when they noticed their customers were not sending them payments, we received a call from them, wondering if we sent out their billing and mailing?. So, in summary: It is very important we have your correct email address and phone number. Your phone number is on your statement / invoice and is what you are telling your customers your phone number is, it can also be useful to us if we need to call you with any problem. The email address is used by us "only" to send you the "Billing and Mailing Denied" email or the "Billing and Mailing Completion" email which has your whole billing history including dates and current balance. It is always a good idea to send your self a paper billing statement / invoice once-in-a-while to make sure all your information is still correct.

11/8/10 Account Balances. We are finding a lot of customers are sending their Mailing Requests with out the funds in their account to adequately cover the cost of their mailings. This may not seem important but when we have over 800 customers and one third are $2.00 to $1,000.00 short this creates a huge problem. Last month we carried over $4,700.00 in mailings for customers that did not have enough money in their account to cover their mailing costs. We will, no longer send out any mailing request unless there is exactly enough in your account to cover the total mailing costs. When you receive our "Billing and Mailing Completion" email you will see either : Special Notes: None. or Special Notes: Balance Low. which means, based on your previous billing history, that you will most likely not have enough money in your account to cover another mailing.

9/16/10 Power Failure. Everything is now Working!! Earlier Today there was a Complete Power Failure in the Dallas Texas Facility where our Billing Pros Servers are located. This was the first time since we started Billing Pros (over 12 years ago) we have ever experienced a problem like this. The Billing Pros Site was down for about 6 hours. Everything is now working!!

6/10/10 Fixed Upper Navigation Bar. The Upper, Black, Navigation Bar on the Billing Pros Web Site has now been fixed. This is something that we never thought of until recently, talking with a new customer and having to explain how to use the drop down to navigate to specific pages. Now you can just click directly on the Main Headings like "Members Login", "Contact Us" etc. and it will take you where you want to go. This will make navigating through the site much easier.

1/23/10 New Office Phone Number is (951) 940-8384. We have now changed our Office Number to (951) 940-8384 because we simply had way to many problems with the older line that Verizon just fixes rather than replaces. Please make a note of our new office number.

1/22/10 Office Phones currently not working (951) 940-8382. Verizon again has shown us how shoddy their phone service and maintenance on their service is. We have had serious rain storms for the past 5 days but that should not have caused the failure of our office phones. The problem is in the Verizon line and they tell us it should be fixed 1/21/10 but to day is now 1/22/10 and still have not been fixed. Maybe some time To-Day. This issue will have zero effect on billing and mailing customers, receiving email, sending email, the Billing Pros System or any other part of our daily business practices...we just can not answer the office phones.

11/4/09 Paper Bill Now Button causing "Page Cant Be Found" error - in the Online Billing Program. Thanks to one of our customer who called us letting us know about this problem. We determined that our SQL Server Space was just about maxed out. We have added a lot of new Customers and a failure to remove years worth of customers history was the root cause. In the past we would go through and delete old History keeping customers History that is about 1 year old. The years seem to fly by and we did not maintain this practice. SQL Server Space is very expensive and we will keep a better eye on this issue. We did clean out the Data Base this morning and removed all customers History up till January 1st 2008. Tomorrow we will be adding more SQL Server Space which should keep us functioning trouble free for a few more years. I was trying to remember the last time we had to add more SQL Space and I think it was at least 3 or 4 years ago. Any How ....please let us know if you ever have an issue with our Online Billing Program... as we can not fix it, if we don't know its broke.

2/25/09 Smaller Customers Using Our Online Billing and Mailing Program. We have been extremely busy with many new customers and are finding it sometimes impossible to make the 24 hour job completion. Please allow 2 days for your processing and job completion...(remember!!! don't change your data until you receive the email stating your "billing and mailing has been completed") even though most times, we will still have it completed in 1 day.

4/13/08 Data Upload Modified. We have added a small bar graph to the Data Up Loader. This will make it easier for our customers who send large data files to view their up load progress.

12/17/07 Please...try to mail all payments to Billing Pros strictly using 1st class regular mail. We have been having problems with several customers making payments to us using FedEx or USPS Next Day, Second Day Air etc. All Postal, FedEx and UPS Deliveries are made outside the Gated Perimeter of this facility....thus we do not know when the Post Office or FedEx Delivery Person is here. Since most times we are unavailable to sign for the payment package we usually just find a yellow slip saying that they will attempt to deliver the following day. When the following day comes around - we then find another note saying that we need to pick up the delivery at the Post Office. This will and does cause serious delays in mailing and processing of those customers. We simply do not have the time to stand around waiting to sign for a customers payment nor do we have the time to wait inline at the Post Office to pick up customers payments. Please...try to mail all your payments to us strictly using 1st class regular mail.

Billing Pros servers are currently being reset 10:00 PM Pacific Time. This usually takes about 5 minutes to run all scheduled maintenance tasks. Please try to avoid using the Billing Pros System at that time.

= system is working perfect with no problems.

= system is being worked on, updated or experiencing problems.

= system has new features, changes or important customer information.