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Balancing my check accountBalancing my check accountPosted Sep 14, 2005 12:35 UTC (Wed) by lwn163 (guest, #11797)In reply to: Balancing my check account by chrispe Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)
I'm not married to the idea of checks, but I do want a paper trail for most
For the things that I do keep track of electronically, I've been using an
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About cheques... Posted Sep 14, 2005 13:19 UTC (Wed) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] Cheques are one of those things that varies a lot between countries. Australia has cheques but they're becoming rarer. The fees are crazy and they takes three days to clear. You want to wait three working days for your salary to be available? Most people choose for direct deposit, then it's available the next day. You're supposed to get a slip from your employer when you're paid though.
Here in the Netherlands they experimented with cheques but the fraud was so bad that they killed it fairly quickly. Here it works in reverse, the bill has a tear off section with the account number of the account to be paid to. You fill your account number and sign it and send it to *your* bank, no third party involvement. So it's more like payment authorisation.
I worked in a company in Australia that accepted cheques and they were the single most annoying method of payment. First the customer sends it to you. You have to copy by hand the details into the system to record the payment. Then you take all the cheques to the bank. Three days later you find out which cheques bounced due to insufficient funds. You then have to undo the payment in the system, add the bank fee to the account, contact the customer who then hopefully pays some other way. Ugh! Gimme electronic payment anyday.
If the customer doesn't have the money, why should I care? Why am I even involved in the process?
I wouldn't mind if cheques disappeared from the face of the earth.
Balancing my check account Posted Sep 14, 2005 15:08 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] I do want a paper trail for most transactions, for reasons similar to why I want a paper trail for electronic election machinesI think you don't need checks for this. Even though my salary goes directly to my bank account, I get a quite detailed paper about this (which also includes the money that didn't get to my account, e.g. taxes). My bills are atomatically payed from my account and I get a paper from the electricity company, from the gas company, etc. When I pay with the debit card, I get receipts, just like when I get cash from the ATM. And I also get a monthly summary from the bank about my accounts on paper.
Balancing my check account Posted Sep 14, 2005 19:02 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] The real idea about balancing a check account is really to keep a budget. This is something that doesnt seem to be taught or 'learned' by people these days as can be seen by the fact that people seem to just keep using the ATM card until it says 'no more money'.
Balancing my check account Posted Sep 15, 2005 7:19 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link] Sure. But thats not the entire (or even the main) point of using an application like Gnucash.The point is, to be able to make wise decisions about your finances, the first needed step is to *know* what your finances actually are. This doesn't mean only how much money you have, and how much you spent, but also what you spent it on. Using Gnucash I can easily and quickly answer questions like:
Sure, you can answer all of those without a personal finance program, but it gets complicated and tedious. Especially when you, for example, own stock on an exchange where courses are given in norwegian-krone, pay fees associated with that to a brokerage wanting british-pound, live in and have most of your transactions in Euros.
Balancing my check account Posted Sep 22, 2005 13:50 UTC (Thu) by sphealey (guest, #1028) [Link] >> I do want a paper trail for most transactions, for>> reasons similar to why I want a paper trail for electronic >> election machines
> I think you don't need checks for this. Even though my
Consumer fraud / consumer protection laws are extremely weak in the United States, and in any dispute those laws greatly favor the entity with the most money and most political power. Which 99.99999% of the time is not the consumer.
Should you as a consumer end up in a dispute with a creditor or vendor of any type (particularly a financial institution), your _only_ hope is to have actual paper records of everything and to have sent every transaction via US Mail. As soon as you start bringing forth phone calls, e-mails, and electronic transactions as evidence the presumption of liability shifts to you and you lose. Guaranteed.
So while their is an element of conservatism in the continued use of checks/cheques, for those who are concerned about such things there is an element of self-preservation as well.
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Balancing my check account Posted Sep 24, 2005 6:21 UTC (Sat) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link] I've had about a 5% failure rate cashing pay checks. My bank is always ready to interpret "09/24/05" as "May 9, 1924" (despite the fact that the cheque has clearly labelled year, month, and day fields under the date area), resulting in the bank's refusal to honor the check. Handwritten checks have an even higher failure rate. In one case my check was stolen from the armored car servicing the ATM.
To date I have received every electronic payment on time, even in cases were major technical problems with the payment systems (either on my employer's end or at the bank) would seem likely to interfere. Hundreds of payments with no errors...just what I'd expect from properly maintained and supervised information systems.
These days I can barely avoid chuckling when I hand over an arbitrary piece of paper with no authentication beyond a signature to a bank teller...how could such a lame protocol actually work? Well, with a failure rate in the low double digits and an ongoing fraud/anti-fraud arms race, clearly, it *doesn't* work.
In the worst case, all one has to do is get the bank and the creditor/vendor on a conference call, read out the transaction confirmation number from your statement or electronic payment, then sit back and listen while they argue about where the money went.
So far it works every time. Usually what happens is that the creditor/vendor finally admits that their payment data is imported through a human data entry clerk, a fax machine, highly buggy third-party software, or by reading transaction details over the phone...or some combination of these. Maybe someone has typed in the wrong account numbers or the wrong amounts. Some companies have a 3-6 month (!) lag between accounts receivable and accounts billable. Sometimes, when the creditor/vendor finally figures out where your money went, you get to hear a meaty slapping, tearing, or rustling sound over the phone, as if someone is slapping their forehead or pulling out their hair.
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