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WELL, THE LATEST RATE CASE is under way, and that means sometime in late spring or early summer of 2007 new postage prices will go into effect.

The U.S. Postal Service already has started making the “sooner rather than later” noises that have long bothered the mailing industry. It's not that mailers can't understand why rising costs eventually must be reflected as higher prices. But they find it exasperating, 35 years after postal reorganization, that the USPS still doesn't understand the dynamics that drive its customers' businesses.

Contrary to what some think, preparing to accommodate an omnibus rate change is not a simple thing. It's more than just a matter of plugging new numbers into old charts.

Despite all the yammerings about “simplicity” in the rate schedule, even a cursory examination of R2006 reveals that a lack of complexity isn't one of its hallmarks. Indeed, determining your new postage costs is impossible without a computer. You not only have to factor in a change within existing rate categories; you also have to determine the differential effects of some of the new categories the USPS has proposed.

Factoring in those old and new categories can be particularly thorny since you really won't know where your mail will fall until you know the rules for mail preparation, qualification and entry. This also presumes, of course, that you already know what the Postal Rate Commission intends to recommend or what the Board of Governors might approve.

For many mailers the challenge is even more daunting. Postal rate software has to be created — and that, too, is hard to do until the USPS publishes its final rates and mailing rules in the Federal Register.

After 35 years, you'd think the postal service would have a firm grasp on the challenges its customers face at rate-change time.

But when you hear some postal executives speak, you begin to understand that this is simply not the case.

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GENE A. DEL POLITO is president of the Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom) in Arlington, VA.