Looking for ways to automate my banking

rupert654

Heya,

I currently manage several small bank accounts for a variety of clubs and societies. Although each account is not a great deal of work for me, overall it has started to turn into a sizeable portion of my time. Consequently, I want to find ways to handle them more efficiently.

Firstly, each account needs to have more than one signatory on the account. Currently the banks that I use cannot give me online banking with this functionality. Are there any that would support this?

Secondly, I currently write a lot of cheques to cover a variety of expenses. How can I do this electronically without costing any money? Are bank transfers secure and is it reasonable to ask people for their account details?

Alternatively, how easy is it to start printing my own cheques and will banks accept them?

agrinnall

I don't believe it is currently possible for a dual or more signatory account to be managed online - it may be possible for business accounts but probably only by paying for it. as a result I don't think you'll be able to make electronic payments.

If by printing cheques you mean printing the payee and amount on cheques supplied by the bank that should be fine, but I don't think you'd be able to print the signatures, and you would have problems if you printed the cheque on plain paper. Although it may be legally acceptable it would cause difficulty for anyone you paid as the cheque wouldn't have the MICR details so it couldn't go through the normal presentation and would take longer than normal and possibly would have to be paid for.

rb10

CAF Bank and Unity Trust bank both offer free online banking for charities. You can have multiple signatories set up, and can make online payments, free of charge.

It's perfectly reasonable to ask people for bank details, and will make your life significantly easier. You'll still get a few people who will insist on cheques, simply because they do not understand that there is no security risk in giving you their bank details.

agrinnall

rb10 wrote: »

CAF Bank and Unity Trust bank both offer free online banking for charities. You can have multiple signatories set up, and can make online payments, free of charge.

Is that multiple signatories who can individually do online banking, or do they have some way of enforcing a second person to authorise any transaction done by the first person?

rb10

agrinnall wrote: »

Is that multiple signatories who can individually do online banking, or do they have some way of enforcing a second person to authorise any transaction done by the first person?

It depends on how the mandate is set up.

You can choose to have it set up so that any one person can make payments.

Or you can set it so that one person sets up the payment, and it sits in a 'pending' area until a different signatory approves it.

This is true dual-authorisation online banking. But it's currently only available from these two specialist charity providers, and not from mainstream high-street banks.