Forum Moderators: martinibuster
As a non US citizen cashing my cheque is becoming an increasingly difficult prospect. You see not only do I have to arrange for my cheque to be cashed, exchanged into Aussie dollars (which involves the filling in of two forms) - cheques over $#*$!x require further authentication which means the cheque has to be physically sent back to the US before they are cleared. Despite the planes that fly back to the US every day this extra process takes a further 6 weeks!
So the money that I earned on the first day of September is not likely to hit my bank account until the 18th December (if I'm lucky)!
Of course I'm getting used to it now - money still comes to me every month - but its amazing that a company with as many innovations and cutting edge technologies as Google can't arrange for the people who are paying a lot of their bills to get their share of the profits a little quicker than 108 days after they earned them.
Of course I shouldn't complain too much - my real gripe is with Amazon which only sends cheques quarterly. The money I earned from them on the first day of July won't hit my bank account until 18th December also!
The only explanation I can think of is that Google find it cheaper to mail us pieces of paper - although surely a company of this scale could negotiate very reasonable bank charges for direct transfers.
Personally, if there are extra charges involved, I would be happy for google to deduct a little from my payment to cover expenses.
I'll bet they add this feature before long. I mean come on, Google is a tech leader.
Personally, if there are extra charges involved, I would be happy for google to deduct a little from my payment to cover expenses.
They take money out of my adword account through my bank, why can't they put my adsense money back into my account in the same fashion?
It's a one-way street with them on this concern. Welcome to Corporate America.
Just be patient. It will come.
It's not.
It wouldn't be in Google's interest to have a variety of different systems. If they go for direct debit (which itself is a misleading term, it's direct/electronic deposit :)) then it would make sense to not have the admin headache of also running a cheque posting system.
Bear in mind that publishers are spread all over the world. To have a direct deposit for publishers in a variety of different countries from the US to Uzbekistan calls for monumental organisation. Several of these countries don't have sophisticated banking systems, the legal requirements vary widely from country to country, some will refuse to work in English, some are very fussy about "outsiders" sending money to their citizens, at least one government would require that they be formally informed each time payment was made to a subject residing in their territory. Some would require Google to deduct tax at source. Then laws change, tax rates change, and Google would have to keep up with changing legislation in all countries where they have publishers, even if they have only one publisher in Awkwardistan who only earns $5 a month.
Then, banks in some countries are notoriously slow. If you've deposited a cheque and it takes weeks at least you aren't emailing Google complaining about it. If Google sends the money directly to your bank they will be inundated with emails of "my payment hasn't arrived yet".
Stop and think for a second guys, there are countries other than yours ;) and they may well work differently ;)
Google may not ever introduce direct deposits.
[edited by: Macro at 5:02 pm (utc) on Nov. 4, 2004]
>>Google may not ever introduce direct deposits.
I'll still bet they do it in the US.
They take money out of my adword account through my bank, why can't they put my adsense money back into my account in the same fashion?
One possibility, albeit probably a small one, that no one has mentioned is interest.
The quicker you can get the cash into your account, and the slower you pay it out, could mean quite a large sum of cash for doing virtually nothing... especially with a company of Google's size.
Like the thread-starter noted, Amazon pays out quarterly... almost assured that one of the reasons is so they can have the cash sit in their account, instead of yours, for those 3 months.
These 2 must be pretty straight forward.
It benefits any large company to hang on to money as long as possible.
However, direct deposit in the US would save Google a lot of money and time in processing...
for the first time ever though for me though the homepage of my main site is full of paying advertisers and no google ads so i might be weaning off them soon :)
By contrast I am now having to deal with the second AdSense cheque that has "gone missing in the post" this year. (And believe it or not the same thing has happened with my CJ cheque... perhaps I should find a new postman? >;-> )
To make things worse Google is moving away from allowing PO Box addresses. That means if you have a rural mailbox out on the road you have to worry about theft.
How about the people to get their big checks by UPS? Surely direct deposit would be cheaper and much safer.
If the Adsense rep sees this please let Google know that many of us would like to have direct deposit.
I'd be willing to let google take some cash out of my earnings for either direct deposit or even for them to send me multiple cheques (ie to keep them under the threshold of my bank's 'send it to america for 6 weeks' procedure.)
Paypal can directly deposit into my Aussie account so I can't see why Google can't.
Anyway - I'm sure its on their agenda - we talk about it in these forums enough.
It's not actually all that complicated to send a wire transfer - we send and receive them all the time - once the details are set up with a bank it takes about 5 seconds to send and is in the account within 24 hours - not brain surgery.
Sure some of the awkwardistans may be tricky, but in our experience it has been the usastan that is the most problematic. We had to withdraw from the eLance preogram because of their complete inability to send a wire transfer to us - other companies in the US (ie those not using the bank eLance uses) had no problems.
It's easy to blame it on the "backwards third world", but the problem is often a lot closer to home.
Regardless, as an interim method I'd ike to see them credit my adsense money to my Adwords account. As another poster pointed out they have no problems swiping that money of my card by due date.
I received the September cheque about a week ago.
>> I'm sure it must be pretty simple to pay people by bank transfer
It's not.
It is in the UK. VERY easy in fact. As Google now have an office in the Republic of ireland it would be the easiest thing in the world to do. It would take me about an hour to set up ALL UK publishers and then monthly processing would cost them a fraction of what sending out cheques would. In fact if they are looking for someone to do it, I'll do it for a percentage of their monthly savings-BIG winner for me.
Bully for you.
macro stated :
>>I'm sure it must be pretty simple to pay people by bank transfer
It's not.
In the Google context I'll repeat: It's not.
In fact if they are looking for someone to do it, I'll do it for a percentage of their monthly savings
No doubt there is some arcane reason why Google doesn't offer a wire option - but in the meantime, it'd be nice if they credited the money to my adwords.
I would like to see that too. But if I was running Google I'd see insufficient reason to give up a few million dollars worth of cash flow (as someone else pointed out).
They wouldn't pay more for cheque processing unless they had good reason to (please also see msg 7 which isn't addressing a blurred issue ;)). They have some pretty smart guys capable of doing more than the basic 2+2 maths, and if the numbers add up favourably for direct deposits that's what they'd do unless they had some other reason/s not to. My posts were to suggest some possible reasons why they may not do it and why it may a choice thing rather than lack of ability.
I'm not just blaming the third world banking system (I'm a qualified banker and worked for a long time in India's nationalised banks - I'm not knocking developing country banks). Some of the "developed" world is awfully bureaucratic to deal with and when it comes to biting your head off the "developed" countries have bigger teeth :)
AND only charges $1.46 USD for direct debits into bank accounts into New Zealand.
It's so fast, and so cheap, why the hell can't adsense do it. I think Paypal sets the standard here.
Where I do feel the system falls down is the lack of security. It would be better if the mail had to be signed for. That's not available internationally from the US (as far as I know), but that could be addressed by having all European cheques posted in Europe.
Anyway the thing that exercises me is not the method of payment, but the amount. Aargh! What happened to the dollar?
You can't compare Adsense with Paypal. Moving money around is Paypal's business, all day and every day. Naturally they have systems in place to do this.
That's very generous of you. Maybe you even have all the legal expertise to handle the payment of funds to UK bank accounts wherever in the world the account holder is and whichever tax system he comes under, especially considering the anti money laundering paranoia European governments now have
I do. So indeed it is "bully for me".
You also make huge assumptions. I will make another assumption, that you have (as I have) been working in the Financial services industry for 23 years. I know what I am talking about. What part of the financial services industry in the UK are you in?
[edited by: blairsp at 11:03 am (utc) on Nov. 5, 2004]
send a wire rather than a cheque as opposed to getting blairsp to set up a google-dollar processing plant
They don't even need to do that. The UK financial system has a process known as BAC's.
This will allow payments to be made directly into all UK banks simply by giving a list of payments to be processed to their OWN bank. Publishers bank details will change how often 1% of publishers once every year at most?
Google would need ONE bank account in the UK. ONE list sent monthly (electronically even) to their bank or they could even do it themsleves through some form of internet "bill payment"- although please not with cahoot! (see the BBC website for details). ANYONE who has experience of paying direct as a business or as a bank/er will know this.
This site gives a very brief description of it. [school-resources.co.uk...]
