Order of debits and credits on statement

trailingspouse

Just curious really as to why my bank does this. If I have a large payment going out, I might need to pay money in to the account to cover it (on the bank account I'm talking about I don't have any overdraft facility).
So, I transfer funds into the account, then make the payment. My balance goes up and then down again. I've never tried it, but I'm assuming that if I tried to make the payment without sufficient funds, it wouldn't let me because I don't have an overdraft facility.
However, when I get my bank statement, it always shows the money going out before it comes in, with a corresponding negative balance. I've never been charged anything for going into the red, but it still comes as a shock when you know the account has always had a credit balance, when you see those minus signs.

Why do they do that? Why not just show the transactions in the order they happened?

Joe_Bloggs

Name that bank and perhaps more will share your irritation.

Money is a 24/7 item.



It a pity that many banks are Monday to Friday only. There is a lot of commercial activity at the weekend.


Manual weekend payments from Mon-Fri Banks can be made via the faster payments service. As far I know these take place immediately.


I have many current accounts. The Weekend is when I get chance to take stock of my situation.
J_B.



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JuicyJesus

That is just how some banks are. They organise transactions on statements so that debits come before credits, and they've probably done it for decades and there's no particular reason to change it (given that most banks' systems are literally decades old and changing them for something non-essential like this is more trouble than it's worth) so that's how it is.

It's just a foible of particular banks. It doesn't really affect anything concretely since overdraft fees and interest are charged on end of day balances rather than whatever happens during the day - you could go a million pounds overdrawn at 9am and assuming you were back in credit by 5pm (or midnight, or whenever your bank says) you wouldn't pay a penny. If it personally annoys you your answer is to go to a bank that doesn't do it.

pmduk

It's traditional AFAIK,

Joe_Bloggs

Are algorithmic 20 Nanosecond high frequency trades restricted to Monday to Friday ? Are we being spun a line about what happens to money in banks over the weekend ?



J_B.

JuicyJesus

Joe_Bloggs wrote: »

Are algorithmic 20 Nanosecond high frequency trades restricted to Monday to Friday ? Are we being spun a line about what happens to money in banks over the weekend ?



J_B.

I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at. It's a limitation of systems that are extremely old but still basically functional and aren't easy to replace - nothing more controversial than that.

trailingspouse

I suspected it might just be 'how it's always been done'.
I'm not annoyed - just curious, as I said in my original post. After all, in order for the transactions to be shown as debits before credits, they have to be rearranged out of the order they were actually done in - which seems like an unnecessary complication.