USPTO rolled out its FM (Financial Manager) system in April of 2016. One of the USPTO’s goals is to force every customer using EFT (electronic funds transfer) for USPTO payments to migrate its EFT method into the FM system. To this end, USPTO has set a last possible date of June 30, 2016 (six days from now) for this task.
If you miss the June 30, 2016 date, USPTO says it will simply shut down your EFT method. To be able to use EFT in future, you will have to create a new EFT arrangement. Setting up an EFT payment method involves an eight-day delay. So you would have a gap of some days or weeks during which you would be unable to use EFT for paying USPTO fees.
Clearly it will save you a lot of trouble if you can get your EFT payment method migrated into the FM system before the remaining six days have passed.
In our office we have two EFTs set up (drawing from two different bank accounts). We found that the migration of the EFT methods into FM was not very difficult (as compared with the high level of difficulty to migrate our Deposit Account).
The chief challenge is that once the EFT methods got migrated, each of the users within our firm had to go through a complicated and annoying process of constructing extra passwords for use of the EFT methods. The result is that each user had to print out yet another password and tape it to his or her computer screen. So much for improving security with these things.
Have you already migrated your EFT payment methods into FM? How did it go? Please post a comment below.