If you have limited staff and resources at your disposal, having workers spend hours waiting in line at the Post Office to send out urgent parcels or oversized letters is time that could be far more profitably spent on other activities.

When running short on time to have post weighed, many workers over-compensate by adding additional postage over and above what is needed to ensure they are covered. Although this usually results in the letter arriving at its destination without difficultly, it is wasteful and the costs of such a practice soon add up. It also creates the possibility of some letters of packages being returned due to incorrect postage - delay which in itself could prove costly.

Switching to a postage meter not only saves time and valuable resources but also money - up to 20 per cent on the cost of standard postage over the course of a year.

With a postage meter and its accompanying scales, you never need worry about paying too much for your mail again. The other huge benefit of using a postage meter is that it makes it extremely easy to tracks the exact amount of money your company spends on sending out mail.

Most modern meters have built-in scales and automatically adjust the amount to be stamped once the item has been weighed. In addition to First-Class Mail, meters also allow you to send out parcel post, international letters and post cards and urgent services like Priority Mail and Express Mail.

For large volumes of mail, postage meters can save a huge amount of time. Even the smaller machines are capable of automatically stamping up to 20 items per minute while large models are even faster. For added convenience, some machines automatically set the day's date, preventing any possibility of postage being wasted on stamps that are then invalid.

Postage meters can only be leased, not purchased. In addition to this ongoing monthly cost you also need to budget for ink refills, other consumables and, of course, the cost of the postage itself.

It is vitally important that you obtain your postage meter from one of the five companies authorized by the USPS to supply them, otherwise your mail will not be accepted by the system.

Although Stamps.com and the postal service's own website both allow users to print directly onto envelopes or onto labels which can then be attached to envelopes, these services are really only suitable for home users with low postal volumes. If you need to send out more than 15 letters each day or if you mail consists mainly of packages and oversized letters, a postal meter is likely to be a far better option.