How to Automate BCC Software

The address list decides what a mailing costs

BCC Software makes the mailing and data quality software that direct mail runs on. It has been building postal software since 1978 and is now part of BlueCrest. Its users are mail service providers, commercial printers, and the mail departments of companies that send at real volume.

The work is unglamorous and completely unforgiving. A customer hands over a list. It gets cleansed, standardised and deduplicated, then sorted into the trays and pallets the postal service wants, in the order it wants them, with documentation that matches the paperwork to the mail. Do it well and the postage drops by a margin that is often the whole profit on the job. Get one thing wrong and the mail is refused at acceptance with a truck already backed up to the dock.

So the software sits where a list of names becomes a postage figure, and everybody downstream, from the press operator to the customer's marketing director, waits on what it says.

The paperwork keeps going after the job leaves the floor

Presorting is the part that is genuinely finished when it is finished. Almost nothing else about a mail job is.

The permit account has to hold enough to cover tomorrow's drop, and finding out it does not is a discovery made at the counter. The drop shipment appointment has to exist, and be for the right facility, and match what is actually on the trailer. The customer has to approve the proof, and has not, and the in-home date they insisted on has not moved. Undeliverable pieces come back weeks later and somebody turns a pile of returns into a report the customer will accept.

Then the money. An invoice for a job that mailed three weeks ago, still unpaid. Postage advanced on a customer's behalf, sitting on the balance sheet as a favour nobody is tracking. And underneath all of it the licence dates: NCOALink, DSF2, the CASS cycle, each one quietly load-bearing, none of them announced.

BCC Software

A permit account checked before the trucks load Every mailing permit balance read against the postage the jobs scheduled for tomorrow will draw, so a drop is never stopped at the counter for a shortfall.

Proofs aged against the in-home date Every proof still sitting unapproved with a customer, counted back from the date they asked for, so the schedule slips on paper before it slips in production.

Licences that quietly take the discount with them NCOALink and DSF2 licence dates and the CASS cycle counted down on the records that hold them, ahead of the renewal rather than after a job fails.

BCC Mail Manager takes a job as far as PostalOne!

Inside the mail file the software does very nearly everything, and a shop not using it fully is buying labour it does not need.

BCC Mail Manager imports lists with validation and cleansing, standardises and deduplicates addresses, presorts, handles Every Door Direct Mail and palletisation, and produces the postal documentation at the end. TaskMaster Automation makes a repeat job repeatable, and Track N Trace reads mailpiece scans through USPS Informed Visibility. DAT-MAIL edits the Mail.dat file without needing a developer, generates postage statements and submits them to PostalOne! automatically. Datavolve and the LENS Platform cover data quality, with NCOALink and DSF2 running as services alongside them.

What all of it has in common is the file. Each tool is authoritative about the mail data in front of it.

The things that stop a job are mostly not in the file. A permit account balance lives on the Business Customer Gateway. A drop shipment appointment lives in FAST. A proof approval lives in a customer's inbox and their patience. An invoice lives in your accounting system, and the returns in a tray by the back door.

A postage account that reports its own balance

Sign into those accounts before the shift starts, read them the way a postal clerk does, and the surprises stop being surprises.

Every mailing permit balance read on the Business Customer Gateway each morning against the postage tomorrow's jobs will draw, so a shortfall is a transfer made today rather than a truck sitting idle. Drop shipment appointments checked against what production is actually building, with an unconfirmed or rescheduled slot raised while there is still a day to move it.

Scan data pulled back and turned into the delivery answer a customer will accept, mailing by mailing, rather than a promise it went out. Proofs still unapproved, listed and aged against the in-home date they were promised for. Licence dates for NCOALink, DSF2 and the CASS cycle counted down on the records that hold them, since an expired one takes the discount with it.

And the money side. Invoices for finished jobs matched against what was actually mailed and actually paid, with postage advanced on a customer's behalf shown as the loan it really is.

Checking four accounts is a poor use of a postal expert

Watching a balance is not postal expertise. It is opening four websites before the trucks load, which is the wrong job for the one person in the building who can read a Mail.dat file.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the Business Customer Gateway, FAST, your accounting system or a customer portal, reads what is there, and lines it up against the jobs BCC Software already holds.

It runs on a schedule you set, in your own environment, and you can watch a run and stop it. Anything submitted to the postal service, sent to a customer or charged against a permit account is drafted and waits for a person.

Each workflow below is built already, and every one names the sites it opens.