What’s Your Least-Favorite Financial Task?

Hereabouts, it’s not the budget. Not economizing through tight times. Not even paying the bills. My least-favorite financial task is scanning checks and depositing them electronically.

A close second — about neck-and-neck, come to think of it — is driving to the credit union to deposit checks. The only branch on this side of town is up at the Great Desert University’s west campus, about as far off my beaten track as possible. Literally, nothing calls me in that direction anymore, and I deeply resent having to burn gas and time to schlep a few checks up there. Hence: electronic deposit.

Two factors contribute to turning this task into an exercise in frustration. First is the exigencies of the credit union’s software system. Second is the endlessly annoying, ditzy HP ScanPro software.

To begin with, the CU demands that checks be scanned in black & white JPEGs, 200 to 300 dpi. NOT color, my scanner’s default (it likes to brag about its “millions of colors”! The CU’s system just hates that). Try to deposit a check accidentally scanned in “millions of colors,” and you’ll hang the credit union’s software. Nor does said program care for grayscale: a check scanned in grayscale is instantly rejected.

So this means you have to remember to fiddle with your software to persuade it to do a b/w scan. But that’s the least of your headaches.

To please the credit union, your check must be scanned JUST SO. The image has to be cropped to exactly the size of the check, with no border around it. And the image of the check’s backside has to be exactly the size of the front image. If it’s not, your deposit will be rejected.

This means you have to set the check on the scanner’s flatbed exactly straight. That is 100% straight straight. The scanner then copies the entire flatbed, and you have to crop the image to the edges of the check. The cropping tool, of course, appears as a rectangular box with right angles all the way around. Set the check on there cattywampus, and you get part of it cut off and part of it with the hated border.

The inside of the scanner’s cover is white, right? Ohhhhkkkaaayyyyy…. If your check is white or pale gray or pale beige, it’s extremely difficult to line up the edge of the cropping rectangle with the edge of the check’s image. Get that wrong, and the CU rejects your deposit because it thinks you’re trying to deposit a fake check, because the size of the front doesn’t match the size of the back.

The first time I rescanned a check four times and couldn’t get the goddamn software to accept a deposit, I called the CU and asked what was wrong with their software.

Nothing, their CSR said. “But here’s a suggestion: scan the check on a black background. Then it’ll be easier to see the check’s edges”

Black? Say what? Am I supposed to paint the inside of the scanner’s lid??????

Well, I had some black card stock from an art class I’d taken some years before.

Set a small piece of paper on a glass plate — dare you to get it straight in the first place! — and when you lay a black card over the top of it, what will it do? Scootch around, of course.

So, you have to tape the damn check to the damn piece of black paper.

And you have to get it straight. Really, really straight. And sometimes when you align it with the edges of the paper, the scanner fails to pick up the edges of the check.

How to do that? Well…scout up a white pencil and use it to draw rules on the damn piece of black paper, so that you can line up the check at right angles to the edges of the scanner glass. Like so…

Starting to get time-consuming, eh? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Okay, now you have your check and you have your annoying black background template sheet thing. Now you have to tape your check to the black sheet. Very, very carefully, because of course you’re going to have to take the tape off one side and turn the check over for a second scan, meaning you dare not rip the damn thing.

BUT…

One piece of tape will not suffice. If you tack the check to the black card with a single piece of tape, the check will…yes!…scootch when you set the card upside down on the scanner bed. No. The scanner software will NOT straighten the image. No. Not a chance. So, you have to affix two pieces of tape, very, very carefully, one to the check’s top edge and one to its bottom edge.

Now, at last, you have the thing in place and you tell HP ScanPro to run “New Scan.” Obediently, it does so, producing a kind of preview that you have to adjust as necessary before scanning to disk. It scans the entire flatbed, meaning you have to grab the cropping tool and reduce the image to fit the check’s image.

BUT…

For unfathomable reasons, if the cropping rectangle that comes up touches the left-hand margin of the flatbed image, HP Scanpro will not allow you to grab the left-hand corners or edge of the cropping rectangle!

This means that if it produces a rectangle that runs all the way from the left side to the right side, you have a little headache. No two rectangles, BTW, are ever the same size or shape. Sometimes ScanPro will produce a cropping rectangle that’s almost the size of the check; sometimes much smaller; sometimes horizontally wide enough to run from edge to edge of the black image but otherwise fairly normal; sometimes deeper than the check but not as wide; and on and on and on to infinity. Sometimes it throws two cropping boxes at you, and then you have to figure out which one will work and delete the other, in a process that is not obvious.

If you have the misfortune of finding a rectangle that spans the black image, then you have to TRY to grab the right-hand side, reduce the rectangle horizontally, then move the rectangle rightward to align with the right-hand edge of the check image, then grab the left-hand side of the rectangle and size horizontally. Then you can get around to sizing the thing vertically.

Very carefully.

Now you scan the thing.

HP ScanPro presents you with FIFTEEN CHOICES for what to do with this check.

The credit union, by the way, also has software that supposedly will scan your check. It will not work with FireFox; it will not work with a Mac. So you have no choice but to scan your check to disk and then upload it to the CU as a JPEG.

As it develops, the best of the 15 choices is to scan it to an Apple e-mail message. This works handily because Apple has the annoying quirk of insisting on inserting JPEG and PDF images into the body of an e-mail message. This actually shortens the increasingly aggravating process you’re enjoying, because you don’t have to open the e-mail and download an attachment: all you have to do is right-click on the image, which pops up automatically in ScanPro, and save to disk.

First, though, you have to check the image to be sure there’s no significant amount of border around the outside of the image — i.e., that you got it straight, and that you cropped it as tight as possible to the check’s border.

If there’s any border to speak of at any edge, or if the JPEG is not straight, you’ll have to go through all of the above to scan it over again. And, quite possibly, again.

And no,  you can not export the image to iPhoto and crop & straighten it there. If you upload the check’s JPEG image to the CU from iPhoto, it will be rejected faster than you can type FO*K! on your keyboard.

So, you finally get this right.

Now you have to trudge through the same process for the other side of the check, making sure that you place the back side on the flatbed in such a way that the endorsement will show on the right-hand side of the image.

By now, you’ve spent about as much time on this process as it would take to drive to the credit union. But presumably you’ve saved the amount of time required for a round trip, eh?

Well. Maybe not.

Why, you ask, don’t you just put the checks in an envelope and snail-mail them to the credit union?

Why, indeed. The last time I did that, some chucklehead there lost the goddamn checks! Yes. They lost a thousand dollars’ worth of checks from my clients!!!!!!!!! Weeks later, just as I sat down to call each one of those worthies and ask them to go to the time and expense of stopping payment on their checks and sending me new ones, the credit union finally managed to find the things.

And that is why, my children, we never send checks to the credit union by snail-mail.

Okay. Now it’s time to upload your images to the handy-dandy Deposit from Home program.

Including the hassle of signing in to the credit union (it often thinks my password is wrong and then I have to go to a special page to convince it otherwise), uploading one check takes SEVENTEEN STEPS PER SIDE!

Got that? You have to jump through those hoops twice for each check (less the two-step sign-in and the navigation to the Deposit-from-Home page): front side, back side. That’s a total of 31 hoop-jumps! Per check!

😆 😥 😆

By the time I’d managed to deposit the two checks that evinced the present rant — one from Medicare B and one from my Medigap insurer — I still had not paid their total toward the Mayo Clinic bill they were intended to defray. But I had killed about as much time as it would have taken to drive way to hell and gone to the West campus, deposit the checks, and then plod all the way back home.

Remaining to do: Exit Deposit-from-Home; boot up Bill-Pay; remit the total amount of the two checks to the Mayo electronically; print out a report proving I’d done the same; file the stack of paper from Medicare, the Medigap insurer, the Mayo, and the credit union.

The only thing this process saved was about a gallon of gasoline.

Et vous? Do you have a least-favorite financial chore?

This post was included in the October 24 edition of the Yakezie Carnival at Figuring Money Out.