With the importance of mail float in the payments industry, it used to be necessary to keep your p. o. box and lockbox processing site local. The reason for this is that mail once took several days if not weeks to get from one side of the country to another. But although the stigma remains, this is no longer the case, as US mail is now delivered faster than ever. When we think of the US post office we envision an old fashioned snail mail delivery service, but the truth is that mail is now carried on the same planes that your overnight delivery packages for Fed-ex and other big name overnight carriers. To illustrate this point the above map shows the current mail guidelines. For a piece of mail sent to Lighthouse Payment Services that originates in the orange shaded section, it will arrive to us in two business days. Add just one additional business day beyond that for any mail that originates in the yellow shaded section. So, if you live in Chicago or San Diego or Miami and send mail to Massachusetts on Monday it will all arrive by Wednesday according to Post office standards. Moreover, with same day lockbox processing, anything that arrives in the mail that day is processed that day. This makes the physical location of your lockbox service provider far less relevant.
Mail Float: Why PO box location isn’t as important for lockbox
