With tax season upon us, most of you will be importing your property tax warrant and printing tax bills in the coming weeks. I’d like to alert you to a paper/perforation issue that may affect the visibility of the return address and/or owner mailing address, depending on the type and style of window envelopes in which you mail your bills.

In the version of Tax Collect that you are currently running, the placement of the return address and owner mailing address on your tax bills is fixed within the bill template (i.e. there is no setting to reposition the address lines up or down). This became a limitation for some of you last year when the supplier through whom we purchase the blank tax bills provided paper stock on which the two perforations were not placed in such a way as to create three equal-sized thirds when folded.  As a result, depending on the type and style of envelopes you use, some of you found that the return address and/or the full owner address did not show properly through the envelope window(s).

We brought this to the supplier’s attention last year and were told it would be rectified. And then it happened again this year.

So depending on your envelopes and whether you ordered your tax bill stock directly from us this year, you may find that the top perforation on the tax bill paper is too low by about an eighth of an inch, giving you a slightly larger top portion. Consequently, the return address and/or owner mailing address might not line up correctly within your envelope window(s).

Whether you order tax bill paper directly from us, use another supplier, or use an outside vendor to print and mail your tax bills, we recommend you do the following well before finalizing and printing all of your tax bills:

• If you print your tax bills in house, we recommend you print out just a few tax bills and actually fold and stuff them in your envelopes to determine if the return address and owner mailing address line up within your envelope window(s). Note that if your warrant has not been finalized yet you can still just reprint a few bills from your last 2016 property tax warrant to diagnose if there is an issue.
• If you print your tax bills using an outside printing company, you will need to contact them directly to coordinate and confirm the return address and owner mailing address fit within the window envelope.

If you determine the return address and/or owner mailing address do not line up properly in your envelopes, give us a call and we can provide you with a quick Tax Collect update that will allow you to individually adjust up or down where the system places the addresses on the bills.

Let us know if you have questions and/or need us to provide you with the update.