About cheques...

About cheques...

Posted Sep 14, 2005 13:19 UTC (Wed) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: Balancing my check account by lwn163
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)

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.

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