Local Merchants Benefiting from Check Collection Agency

When a check “bounces,” how high does it go?

If it’s up to Jeff Stremick or Sue Burger, co-owners of CheckRite, their office is as far as it should go. The franchise has been in Minot since 1978 and has seen an increase in the number of merchants that utilize their services. Stremick said the benefits to the merchant are many.

“We collect the bad checks for free,” Stremick said. “State law, first of all, prohibits the writing of bad checks, but it also provides a fee to allow a collection agency to recover those funds for the merchant. The merchant doesn’t have to deal with those collection efforts and gets their amount of the purchase. It saves them the time and expense of doing it themselves.”

Stremick said that CheckRite serves a nine-county area. Stremick and Burger, along with Sheldon Gudmonson, purchased the franchise from the original owners in 1990 and also purchased an additional service, called CheckGard, in 1997.

The business has grown from the nearly 300 business accounts in 1990 to more than 1,500 merchants today.

“Part of that growth was from our purchase (of CheckGard) and there are still a lot more businesses that could use our services,” Stremick said. “A lot of them just aren’t aware of how easy it is to get started. In the smaller communities, it may just be that they know everyone and don’t want to turn those checks over. I have signed up people and they end up saying, ‘Why didn’t I do that years ago?’ It’s really a very simple process.”

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