Bacs on a Saturday

Hanney1883

Do people make a Bacs payment on a Saturday? Would day 1 be the Monday? 

Someone has sent money over by Bacs on a Saturday I didn’t think you could do that 

molerat

Are you sure they used BACS and not FP ?

Hanney1883

Definitely Bacs said to allow 3-5 days but found it odd that they sent it in a Saturday 

eskbanker

There's unlikely to be anything preventing a company from submitting a transaction to BACS at the weekend, but nothing would actually happen until the next working day, i.e. Monday, with the funds then being in transit on Tuesday and arriving on Wednesday....

molerat

They will likely have set it in motion on Saturday but day 0 will be Monday

Hanney1883

This is what I thought even tho they said Saturday the first working day would be the Monday, fingers crossed it’s in there tomorrow… Thank you for your replies 

flo22

There is no Bacs on a Saturday.  The can create a file and submit it when Bacs opens at 7am on Monday but they can't submit it on a Saturday.

penners324

Why do companies still use bacs? It's a proper faff to set up compared to FP and costs more

Daliah

penners324 said:

Why do companies still use bacs? It's a proper faff to set up compared to FP and costs more

For many companies, it will be a case of "If it's not broken, don't fix it". They have tried and tested processes to make BACS payments. To move their payments to FP would require system and procedural changes as well as staff training. The business case for doing so is probably quite weak, so it won't be top priority for them. Startups would probably use FP from day one, though, and one of these years, there will probably no BACS (and CHAPS) users left.

SiliconChip

penners324 said:

Why do companies still use bacs? It's a proper faff to set up compared to FP and costs more

I worked on the development of Faster Payments for one of the big banks back in 2007/8 (so bear in mind that my knowledge is rather out of date) and at that time the main reason for the BACS Direct Credit system remaining in place for businesses was that it allowed batch files containing many thousands of payments (for instance, salaries) to be created and submitted in one go. It would have been impractical to submit that many payments by FPS which were always processed as single transactions. Multiple Standing Orders were added to FPS, so it's possible that a similar process for DCs has been added in the years since then, although the fact that so many still use BACS might well suggest that it hasn't.

flo22

Most salaries are still paid by Bacs.  For most large companies Bacs costs less than FPS.  The bulk entry (one debit entry on statement when paying 100s of credits) is a big benefit.