Check with your credit union. The physical checks only occur for those businesses that the bank does not have an agreement with to transfer funds. I do my bill paying online through my bank and only 2 or 3 of the recipients do not have an agreement with the bank to transfer funds in their account (usually it means with the bank their account resides in). There is of course software that handles this and the recipient has to be able to match the account # to a portion of the funds or willing to accept a report of such. The banks have to agree (almost all do) and then the business has to agree with their bank as well. (sometimes their bank charges a fee for this service) For those small businesses who don't want to be charged the per transaction fee, they must wait for the physical check to arrive.


>>According to a story on CNNMoney.com, economic stimulus checks from the U.S. government will go out several days sooner than expected due to what sounds like a computer programming miracle --
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>>The payments will go out ahead of schedule because of a new computer program that updates records daily - faster than an older program that updates weekly, according to Andrew DeSouza, a Treasury spokesman.
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>>http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/24/pf/taxes/Stimulus_checks/index.htm?cnn=yes
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>>Wow! My hat is off to them.
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>The following story is not for the faint of heart.
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>FR Yugoslavia in its early days, or SFRY in its last, never mind - early nineties. Our accountant has only an hour left to make a payment. The payments all go through a state-run SDK - "service of societal accounting", which is actually next door, but they have only this one building, and a limited number of clerks serving the general public. The queue may be of any length... so we fire up the awesome 386, bring up the pre-flood code written in who knows which cenozoic dialect of Fortran (or RPG maybe?), with all of its cryptic two-character codes for various menu navigations, actions, connects and whatever... after an incredible fight with this monster of code, she manages to push the payment through, at incredible and mind boggling 2400 baud... in a total of two minutes.
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>And how did we know that we got money on our account to push this payment? Because we checked few minutes ago, and saw that a customer has paid a bill, also at the last moment, using the same software - and they're in a village somewhere, fighting at probably only 1200 baud. And they couldn't call us to say "we just paid", because they had only one phone line, which was busy serving first the modem in their 286, then a fax. So we knew before they called. Our accountant was actually good at that - she had a hunch when to check, so she wouldn't have to waste 15 seconds to dial in and 30 seconds for the status to refresh every twenty minutes. She'd do it just 2-3 times a day.
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>{you may unfloor your jaws now, take some brandy if you're in shock, have a breath...}
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>Fast forward to the far and distant future of 2008, when processors are about 150 times faster, computers have about 512 times more memory (give or take a binary order of magnitude), disks are about 5000 times larger, and hundreds of thousands of programmers were perfecting the art of communication software for the 15 (and some) years which have passed.
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>I have scheduled $19.90 to be paid on 4th of April, but to a wrong payee. Ten days later, a check comes in mail from this wrong payee, saying they weren't able to find out what to do with it. Wait a minute, this was an electronic payment, wasn't it? What's a check doing there? And why is it some bank in Ohio, payment center, and not my credit union? Well, due to this error, I learned a few things I suspected before, but now I have proof (about 98 proof, good year).
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>My reconstruction of how this "electronic" payment works: my credit union (just like the bank before it) sends, maybe electronically, a list of payments to be made (from whom to whom, amount, date, account numbers etc) and a bulk amount of money. This "payment center" then prints the checks and mails them, snail mail. Which means that if I'm electronically paying something to the grocery across the street (speaking metaphorically, due to zoning the next grocery is 2 miles away), they'll get it at the speed of light... reflected off a check mailed from Ohio.
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>Conclusion: this actually can get slower, if you're the recipient of the check, because it may take anywhere between two or eleven days for the 1.2 seconds of check check to happen, and for the amount to clear from the transitional account (i.e. your bank holding your money in its pockets) into your account.