Recommendations for charity bank account

ilikecookies

Hello folks,

I recently became the Treasurer of a preschool which is registered as a charity. We have a turnover of around £25k/year.

We currently have an account with Santander which is a legacy Alliance & Leicester business account. We are really unhappy with this account as banking cash and cheques is a real headache: it can't be in branch and only at the Post Office which is a bit hit and miss depending on whether the Post Office have the right payment slips in stock. Santander "customer sevice" has also been rather lacking which makes doing any changes to the account (eg. adding new signatories) a painful process.

Can anyone advise a bank which has a good charity account preferably without any fees and allowing the flexibility to do online banking (which some don't seem to allow) and the ability to get cash out, make deposits etc in a local branch.?

Any recommendations would be much appreciated!

Lemoncurd

I'm involved with a couple of similar organisations and have been having similar issues.
It would make it so much easier to have online banking but haven't found a way of doing this with two signatories needed for payments. Surely there must be a bank somewhere with a system where one person can set up payments and another then logs in and approves them???

texranger

i am involved with a volunteer organisation (not charity) and they use HSBC who have specific accounts for this type of thing and have had no issues with these.

mildred1978

Lemoncurd wrote: »

I'm involved with a couple of similar organisations and have been having similar issues.
It would make it so much easier to have online banking but haven't found a way of doing this with two signatories needed for payments. Surely there must be a bank somewhere with a system where one person can set up payments and another then logs in and approves them???

CAF bank have this arrangement.

https://www.cafonline.org

paddyrg

Depending on your banking needs and what your charitable goals are, triodos.co.uk are very good.

Savvy_Sue

The three banks I'd always suggest for charities:

mildred1978 wrote: »

CAF bank have this arrangement.

www.cafonline.org

paddyrg wrote: »

Depending on your banking needs and what your charitable goals are, triodos.co.uk are very good.

And finally, you might find that Unity Trust can help you out. We use them at work and they have all the facilities you mention: we pay in cheques online, and can nominate two bank branches for paying in / withdrawing cash, and also use the Post Office.

The initial opening of an account will probably be painful, however, as each signatory will need to prove their identity. But that will be the same wherever you go!

ilikecookies

Thanks everyone for your suggestions - I will dig deeper into each of the suggestions and see which fits best!