Paying with Debit Card

springydog

On the 26/12/2010 i went into Tesco knowing i had £500 in my Santander Currant account i made a Debt Card payment of £42 and today the 7/01/2011 that £42 payment came out of my account when i had only £20 in my bank (now overdrawn) I have spoken to Santander and the very unhelpfull chap told me "thats how we do things" and "I should check my daily running balance" but I told him "thats why i used my debit card on that day because i had £500 in my account" he then quickly told me to take it up with Tesco because "thats how they do things". It's the fact that the payment took ten days to come out of my account and it seems that the payment came out when spookily i didnt have the funds to cover it. Arghhhh:mad:

YorkshireBoy

Sounds like you need to keep a running balance on paper in your wallet/purse (the reverse of your latest statement is ideal), and assume the money has left your account the moment you enter your PIN or write a cheque.

It's what was done in the olden days before internet banking.

And it's not your bank's problem. They only process what Tesco's merchant acquirer tell them to process...when they tell them to process it.

springydog

I thought as soon as you enter your pin and have to wait for Authorisation and payment is accepted it comes out of your account (it does any other time i use this method of payment) but silly me i dont know how things work.

beecher2

springydog wrote: »

I thought as soon as you enter your pin and have to wait for Authorisation and payment is accepted it comes out of your account (it does any other time i use this method of payment) but silly me i dont know how things work.

No, it takes a couple of days to come out of your account - only your available balance will go down. You used your card on a bank holiday, and then had the bank holiday(s) at New Year which is why it has taken so long to come out of your account.

You need to keep track of what you're paying out, rather than rely on your balance.

no-oneknowsme

springydog wrote: »

I thought as soon as you enter your pin and have to wait for Authorisation and payment is accepted it comes out of your account (it does any other time i use this method of payment) but silly me i dont know how things work.

See , i thought that this was how it worked too. I thought that as soon as you made a purchase , your available balance was adjusted to take the purchase into account , meaning that it didnt matter if the company didnt actually take the payment for a few days it would be ok because your account had already accounted for the amount....

Then , a week before xmas , i used my debit card in Burgerking and assumed that my balance would reduced accordingly.....Burgerking then requested the amount 9 days later making my account overdrawn !!!

Infact , a £20 charge is being taken for this by my bank today:mad:.

twinkle1981_2

I fell into this trap quite a lot. The bank gave me a transaction log book to record all my visa debit payments as they were taking days to come off, but my available balance wasnt always adjusted to reflect payments that were waiting to come off - so a lot of the time I thought I had more money than I did.

It is a pain though that the payments made don't always show straightaway.

molerat

The merchant does not always ask your bank for authorisation, it is known as a floor limit. Some companies have £0 before auth and some have quite large amounts. It all comes down to the fact that you authorised the payment to be deducted from your account and it is up to you to manage your account correctly.

no-oneknowsme

Molerat are you saying that the bank dont have to reduce the available balance when a payment is made on our debit cards ?

Yes , it is our account and so its up to us to manage it but....do you not agree that if the bank reduced our available balance in "real time" then it would be a whole lot easier for us to do this ?

no-oneknowsme

beecher2 wrote: »

No, it takes a couple of days to come out of your account - only your available balance will go down. You used your card on a bank holiday, and then had the bank holiday(s) at New Year which is why it has taken so long to come out of your account.

You need to keep track of what you're paying out, rather than rely on your balance.

But this is what we are saying......we made the purchases and then obviously the bank didnt adjust our available balances hence the reason we went over drawn. If the bank had updated our balance we wouldnt have went over drawn !

I dont know about every one else but in my case i had used my card on so many occasions in the run up to xmas that i just didnt notice that the one payment (by burgerking) hadnt been taken . It was only for around £10 and i just didnt notice that it hadnt been taken

p00hsticks

no-oneknowsme wrote: »

Molerat are you saying that the bank dont have to reduce the available balance when a payment is made on our debit cards ?

Yes , it is our account and so its up to us to manage it but....do you not agree that if the bank reduced our available balance in "real time" then it would be a whole lot easier for us to do this ?

Yes, you ca;nt rely on the bank to reduce your available balance at the time you make a payment on your card - it's not always desirable or possible.

Like molerat says, authorisation isn't always required (if transactions are below the floor limit). And if there are technical difficulties, then the merchant acquirer may step in to authorise the transaction instead of the bank.

You should think of debit card transactions as the more modern equlvalent to writing a cheque, and keep a note of what transactions you are carrying out and check that they have been processed - admittedly it was easier before debit cards and ATMs when you had to write a cheque for everything, and kept a note of the balance on the cheque stub, but really it only needs a bit of paper kept with your debit card.

londoner1998

springydog wrote: »

I thought as soon as you enter your pin and have to wait for Authorisation and payment is accepted it comes out of your account (it does any other time i use this method of payment) but silly me i dont know how things work.

Hiya

it is really, really annoying, but by no means rare- I have noticed this and the time it takes for the payment to be processed varies from place to place (it is normally a couepl fo days, but with bank Holidays in between, It can be anything)- what I do is I leave the money I have calculated I will spend that month in the account- then it doesn't really matter when the paymnets go out, but to do this I need to check my account pretty much every other day, especially towards the end of the month...