Patent ID: 8209267

Claim:
A method comprising: at a first location, optically scanning a unique postal indicium printed by a sender and affixed to a mail piece to obtain an image of a human readable portion and an image of a machine readable portion of the unique postal indicium; automatically decoding the image of the machine readable portion to obtain a value corresponding to a data record associated with the unique postal indicium and to determine whether the unique postal indicium is a mail piece dependent indicium, and, when the indicium is mail piece dependent, reading a flag in the machine readable portion indicating whether a delivery point code on the mail piece has been validated prior to being printed on the mail piece, and handling the mail piece responsive to the determining and reading; using the value to retrieve the data record from a database disposed at the first location; automatically recognizing alphanumeric characters in the image of the human readable portion; comparing the recognized alphanumeric characters with retrieved information from a portion of the retrieved data record to determine whether the retrieved information matches the recognized alphanumeric characters; calculating a class of service based on an amount paid for the unique postal indicium, type of mail piece, and a rate table; performing automatic account adjustment processing on an account associated with a source of the unique postal indicium, when a result of the comparing indicates an incorrect tariff associated with the mail piece, the account adjustment processing including adjusting an account associated with a source of the unique postal indicium based on the result of the comparing, and updating account information at a point of automation in a second location geographically different from the first location with a result of the comparison, the automatic account adjustment processing occurring periodically at predetermined intervals of time; and outputting information to report results of the automatic account adjustment processing.