Rip-off Christmas time late defaults Sums

steveml

Tixy wrote: »

It won't be the credit card companies - once they get the cheque they bank it, once its cleared its credited to your card account.
But the post office are not causing the problem either - they had many warnings around that due to the extreme weather letters were taking much longer to deliver and then were getting slowed down in the usual christmas rush.

Only way you could blame the credit card company is if you had sent the letter as signed for or guaranteed and could prove the date it arrived with them and could prove that they had then taken an unreasonable amount of time to bank the cheque (taking into account bank holidays) or to allocate the payment to the account.

As you didn't do these things it is neither of thems fault.

Come on, let's be honest now and talk about things in the real world. Credit card companies and indeed the majority of large company accounts departments have never been too efficient when processing cheques. Cheque payments are deemed as a bit of a pain by most accounts receivable departments, and I for one have seen cheques lying in inboxes for a number of days awaiting input onto the system. Once this happens the clerk will enter the current date on the system and will rarely bother to look at the postmark on the envelope. Indeed the envelope has usually been binned by the time the cheque is input on the system anyhow. It's far too easy for companies to simply issue a late payment charge and expect the customer to prove otherwise.

Yes, diect debit payment is the solution, but let's not be too quick to persecute the consumer for choosing to make payment by cheque.

Tixy

This thread is over a year old not sure why you particularly felt the need to drag it back up just to respond to my post amongst many, but having just read back I'd stand by my comments on it. Its clear the OP simply didn't leave enough time to ensure his cheque reached the card company in time to be credited to his accountbefore the due date taking into account all the warnings from the post office last year about poor weather and delayed services. Only way he could prove anything different was if he'd sent using a royal mail service that can prove to him the date the cheque was delivered.

Credit card companies may be inefficent, which is why its handy that customers have many more efficent payment options and if someone does want to pay by cheque its handy that royal mail do offer service that allows a persn to prove what date an item was received.