bank charges

begbeer

have just heard from Nat West to say they are putting up our bank charges by approximately 135%, obviously not happy about this and am looking around for another bank, we already have an personal current account with Barclays, and their charges are a lot better but Santander are offering free banking, but they seem to have a very bad customer service record, what is your opinion of them

Horace

I can't comment on Santander - I bank for free with the Co-op using my FSB membership.

steve1980

Santander are bad for customer service (I'm a personal customer) but they do offer free banking.

Premier_2

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/small-business#acc

paddyrg

lloydstsb - about £6/month - any use?

Savvy_Sue

As ever, work out what you need to do with your business bank account, and then shop around to see who offers that service and what they charge for it!

Do you need a counter service, ie to pay cheques / cash in or to withdraw cash? If you do, then you need a branch you can get to. Can you do it all online? If you can, there may be a lot more choice.

If you have a lot of BACS payments going in, Santander appear to be unable to provide details of who these are from, so if you provide a fixed fee service then you could find an awful lot of effectively anonymous payments going in with no means of chasing the late payers.

Premier's given the link to Martin's article, it's worth working you way through that. Note that other banks offer a first year free, which does give you the chance to carry on researching!

Oh, and some people manage to reduce their charges by running two accounts, eg if NatWest are charging for all credits then paying into a bank which doesn't charge for that and then transferring money to NatWest is worth considering.

Some people recommend NOT doing all your banking (personal and business) with the same bank, because the bank CAN get awkward if there's any difficulty with either account.

paulwf

If you use a bank that charges a fee get very familiar with their charging structure so you can work out how to reduce your fees. As a general rule pay staff and bills in cash to reduce the amount you have to pay in and then pay out through the bank again. Instead of paying each invoice as a separate BACS try and lump several invoices together. It all depends if you are a cash based business though.