Why (and how) do councils still use BACS?

Naf

Faster Payments is the standard for all of us these day; so why is it that the council still use the BACS system: I thought that had been shut down? Do other places still use it, too?

duchy

Use it for what?
All councils or just yours ?

Mr_Goodkat

Faster Payments are very much a Personal Banking Solutions.


Businesses especially larger ones still send money via BACS for example both my salary and my expenses reimbursements from my employer are sent by BACS.

Naf

duchy wrote: »

Use it for what?
All councils or just yours ?

In this case Housing Benefit. I'm under the impression it's all, but I guess it could just be some.

Archi_Bald

BACS isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It is the mainstay of how people in the UK get paid, and how people pay their bills by DD. It is functioning magnificiently and there is presently no reason to replace it with anything else.

http://www.bacs.co.uk/Bacs/Corporate/CorporateOverview/Pages/Overview.aspx

bargainbetty

As a business solution, Faster payments are charged at a higher rate per transaction and per item than BACS. I use BACS for business, and it works extremely well.

dr_adidas01

Naf wrote: »

In this case Housing Benefit. I'm under the impression it's all, but I guess it could just be some.

No as pointed out large organisations still use the Bacs 3 day system when sending out payments.

I should imagine as the council will have a large number of payments to send out they would still use this method.

It would be very time consuming and somewhat impractical for them to send each one out as a faster payment, imagine the poor person/s having to manually send out payments to hundreds of people.

When with the bacs system they can upload them all at once and then set the date they want the payment to be paid to the recipient. So much simpler and far less time consuming than doing hundreds of Faster payments.

Not to mention the higher cost they are charged to make faster payments.

Naf

dr_adidas01 wrote: »

I should imagine as the council will have a large number of payments to send out they would still use this method.

It would be very time consuming and somewhat impractical for them to send each one out as a faster payment, imagine the poor person/s having to manually send out payments to hundreds of people.

When with the bacs system they can upload them all at once and then set the date they want the payment to be paid to the recipient. So much simpler and far less time consuming than doing hundreds of Faster payments.

I would have assumed you could bulk upload to FPS just like to BACS. Interesting, thanks.

firefox1956

bargainbetty wrote: »

As a business solution, Faster payments are charged at a higher rate per transaction and per item than BACS. I use BACS for business, and it works extremely well.

Never heard of that one before......
You must have a rather odd business bank account

System

I agree - It's very much up to the organisation which system it uses.

BACS and FPs are often charged identically in business banking. FPs can also be uploaded in bulk, just like BACS direct credit transactions.

Obviously, organisations have legacy BACS infrastructure and might prefer that BACS payments can be recalled.

firefox1956 wrote: »

Never heard of that one before......
You must have a rather odd business bank account

Hazzanet

firefox1956 wrote: »

Never heard of that one before......
You must have a rather odd business bank account

My charges are about £2.50 for an FP, and less than £0.05 for a BACS credit.

Depends on what you can negotiate when you get to enterprise level, which is what a council is likely to be on.