Glossary · Payment methods
Lockbox
Also called Lockbox banking
A lockbox is a bank service that receives a company’s mailed check payments, deposits them and sends the payment data back for matching.
With a lockbox, customers mail checks to a post office box run by your bank. The bank opens the mail, deposits the checks, and sends you images and data — amounts, payers and remittance details — so you can apply the cash.
Lockboxes are a mainly US service, because paper checks remain common in US B2B payments. They speed up deposits and take check handling out of the office.
Some banks offer wholesale lockbox services that also capture data from remittance slips, and many now combine checks with ACH and card payments in one data feed.
Example
A US supplier receives 300 checks a month. Moving to a bank lockbox gets them deposited a day or two sooner, with remittance data sent to its accounting system each morning.