Approving a refund is easy. Getting it delivered, cashed, and reconciled at scale is where programs quietly leak money, goodwill, and compliance standing.
Every refund program is designed around the approval. Legal signs off on eligibility rules, finance funds the pool, someone builds the claims portal, and the project plan declares victory at “refunds approved.” Then the operational half begins — the half where money has to physically reach thousands of people you did not choose as counterparties, at addresses of unknown quality, who may or may not ever cash what you send. That half is where refund and disbursement programs quietly leak money, goodwill, and compliance standing.
Your supplier list is self-cleaning: vendors who want to be paid keep their addresses current. Refund recipients are different — the address came from a years-old order record, a class-action claims form, or a regulator’s file. They did not ask to be your counterparty, they will not call to update their address, and a meaningful share have moved. Treating a refund run like a vendor run is the original sin of disbursement programs.
Expect 5–15% of unverified addresses in a consumer file to be undeliverable. Every one becomes returned mail, an investigation, and a reissue — or worse, a cheque delivered to the wrong person. Address verification and correction before the run is the cheapest fix in the entire program.
Returned envelopes need somewhere to go and someone to own them: log the return, attempt a trace, hold funds, reissue on a corrected address. Programs that route returns to a general mailroom lose track of them entirely — and “we don’t know where the cheque went” is a sentence regulators dislike intensely.
Even perfectly delivered refund cheques go uncashed at meaningful rates — 10–25% on small-dollar consumer refunds. Those stale items are not your money to keep: most Canadian and U.S. jurisdictions treat them as unclaimed property subject to escheatment — due-diligence notices, dormancy tracking, and eventual remittance to the rightful jurisdiction. Programs that ignore the tail build a compliance liability that compounds with every run.
A 10,000-item run with issues, voids, reissues, returns, and partial cashing cannot be reconciled on a spreadsheet after the fact. You need a live register where every item carries its full history — issued, mailed, delivered, cashed, returned, reissued, escheated — or month two of the program becomes archaeology.
| Metric | Healthy range | What a miss means |
|---|---|---|
| Delivery rate (not returned) | ≥ 97% | Address hygiene failed going in |
| Cash rate at 90 days | 75–90% | Wrong addresses or confusing instruments |
| Reissue turnaround | ≤ 5 business days | Returned-mail loop has no owner |
| Items past dormancy without action | 0 | Escheatment liability accruing |
This operational half is precisely what we run: address verification and correction, secure printing and mailing with per-item pricing, delivery method selection by cheque amount, returned-mail handling, a live register covering every item’s full history, bank-held FBO accounts for program funds, and managed escheatment services for the uncashed tail. Counsel keeps the approval half; we make the delivery half boring.
Cheques remain the only instrument that needs no enrollment, bank detail collection, or recipient action to issue — which is why courts and regulators still default to them. The strongest programs issue cheques with verified addresses and offer a digital option for claimants who opt in.
After your stated stale period they enter unclaimed-property territory: due-diligence outreach, dormancy tracking, and remittance to the appropriate jurisdiction. Keeping the funds is not a lawful option in most jurisdictions.
With a clean recipient file, address verification, account setup, and a first print run typically fit inside two weeks — see how onboarding works.
Upload a file, approve the run, and we print, mail, track, and reconcile every cheque. Your first five are free.