Check Your Cheques

beekay1943

I rarely use cheques these days, apart from my weekly payments to the milkman - invariably the same amount every week. I make a point of checking all my bank & credit card statements and regularly check their current states online. Twice within the last three months, two of the £6.00 cheques to the milkman have been debited as £6.27 and £6.09. This amounts to an overcharge of 36p - a relatively "piddling" amount on its own but if the same mistakes are being made daily to hundreds of account holders, the bank is on to a nice little earner. How many customers would check or even complain about such small discrepancies. However, they all appear to be in favour of the bank and not the customer. If I was to be overdrawn by this same "piddling" amount, I'm pretty sure the bank's hefty charges would be implemented immediately, days before I eventually received a lettr in the post advsing me of this overdraft.

I has a similar error in 2005 when the bank said I would charged £50 (I think) if, on recovering and examining the cheque, it was found not to be an error on their part. Their customer service advisor even souned surprised when I demanded that I be reimbursed the overcharge.


On this occasion, I have written to the bank stating that I will expect a reciprocal £50 (for my time and effort) if it is found to have been the bank's fault. I'm not holding my breath however.

I do urge you to check all your cheque (and other) transactions and claim back any overcharge - no matter how small. Whether you similarly report any undercharges is, of course, entirely up to your own conscience,

whitewing

Surely it is the milkman who benefits, not the bank?

flowrypot

Try writing "six pounds only" and put a line next to the amount so it cant possibly altered or missunderstood.

pcombo

guess the milkman hates going to your house OP. Why not just pay cash save the milkman all the time.

beekay1943

I do write "Six pounds only" on the cheque and draw lines through any remaining space. I also enter "£6.00p" in the amount field so there's not much else I can do to be totally clear as to the exact amount.

My milkman delivers at 4.30am so I'm not going to get up that early to give him my cash. A rolled up cheque fits nicely inside an empty bottle (complete with plastic top for weatherproofing) whereas loose cash might well "disappear" during the night.

But your probably right about who benefits from these errors.

glenn_m

Don't know if you know of this site or if they deliver to your area, but we get our milk from https://www.milkandmore.co.uk and it just gets debited from my bank card once a month

Bestselling_Author

I'm going back a few years here, when I used to work for a bank, but ... how can I put this delicately? When cheques were processed, they were done so in 'batches' and understandably the batch of credits and the batch of cheques had to agree to the same figure. If they didn't then, it was necessary to go through and check for the error (which could be hundreds of pieces of paper). If the error was small, say 36p, sometimes it was quicker just to .... you can see where this is going.

If you think the cheque is wrong, question it. The bank won't want to investigate - they're not geared up to moving bits of paper around now, and for such a small amount they may even reimburse the difference because it's quicker debiting a sundry account for 36p rather than pay someone to spend twp hours trying to resolve the query.

But if it's happened to you on more than one occasion, that seems a little strange to me, and should be investigated. (The bank may not be at fault - what if the milkman is adding 36p onto everyone's cheques - it soon mounts up.)

DizzleUK

glenn_m wrote: »

Don't know if you know of this site or if they deliver to your area, but we get our milk from www.milkandmore.co.uk and it just gets debited from my bank card once a month

Over £2 for a 4 pint bottle of milk with "free delivery"? They can take a running jump! I know milkmen are more expensive, but double the amount it is in Iceland just round the corner? Bloody hell fire!

DizzleUK

Bestselling_Author wrote: »

I'm going back a few years here, when I used to work for a bank, but ... how can I put this delicately? When cheques were processed, they were done so in 'batches' and understandably the batch of credits and the batch of cheques had to agree to the same figure. If they didn't then, it was necessary to go through and check for the error (which could be hundreds of pieces of paper). If the error was small, say 36p, sometimes it was quicker just to .... you can see where this is going.

If you think the cheque is wrong, question it. The bank won't want to investigate - they're not geared up to moving bits of paper around now, and for such a small amount they may even reimburse the difference because it's quicker debiting a sundry account for 36p rather than pay someone to spend twp hours trying to resolve the query.

But if it's happened to you on more than one occasion, that seems a little strange to me, and should be investigated. (The bank may not be at fault - what if the milkman is adding 36p onto everyone's cheques - it soon mounts up.)

Ah yes, I remember when I worked for a bank doing just this. Reconciling cheque payments and balancing suspense accounts etc. I particularly remember "losing" close to £1 million for most of an afternoon due to a simple keying error. Turned up in one of the many suspense accounts of course, but I did fear for my job (and if the police were coming) for a few hours.

Usually, these odd 3p here 66p there are just keying errors, which definitely run both ways. You just don't hear about the people who end up with an extra 50p in their accounts because of a banking error.

beekay1943

I used to work in a bank myself in the early 1960s and we would have to balance the books "to the penny" every day before being allowed home - no overtime in those days!. Of course, once staff overtime was introduced, it became financially unviable to spend hours looking for small discrepancies and they were simply "written off." It would be interesting to know just how much a bank considers to be a "small discrepancy" these days.

I have since made an online check of the cheque clearing system and it seems to have changed little over the years. The Payee (Milk Company) will present my cheque for £6.00 to their local bank and staff there will credit their account with that amount. The cheque would then have been sent to a clearing bank where all cheques are sorted and returned to the Bank and Branch of origin (my bank.) There, staff will debit my pesonal account with the amount written on the cheque. My cheques are always written very clearly (as stated in a previous post) and it is highly improbable that the staff at both banks made the identical mistake and misread the cheque for exactly the same sum (27p) so one can assume that the error occurred at my own branch only. This would mean that my bank is the only one advantaged by these erros.

maninthestreet

Next time you write a cheque out for the milkman, scan it after you have written it out.