Lloyds bank ...

Lloyds bank ...

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Lloyds are having a bit of a push on Aweb, there is a survey about would you recommend them for business banking - when I took the survey the result did not surprise me.

A message to Lloyds if you are reading - until you get rid of your ridiculous 150 transaction limit on downloads (and that applies to all affiliiates I think, certainly Halifax) you cannot seriously compete for business banking, especially given the move to software that can upload bank transactions.

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By chatman
29th Aug 2014 10:42

Aren't they all crap?

The thing is, aren't they all crap? Does anyone know any bank that is efficient, has good, working systems and gives good service?

I think the problem is that the barriers to entry in retail banking are so high that the existing ones effectively have a monopoly and are not forced to be any good. Even when they do fail, we are forced to donate our income to save them.

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By User deleted
29th Aug 2014 13:15

Depends I think ...

... I am lucky and have a brilliant manager at Natwest, who allow you to download 12 months tranactions at a time. The commercial banking is very good at Natwest, I can download copies of cheques, paperwork for CHAPS and wire transfers but it does cost the client.

Barclays are not to bad on the online side either .

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By Cloudcounter
29th Aug 2014 14:16

Online banking

Lloyds's limit is bad enough, but they don't actually tell you when it's been applied.  f you know about it you can carefully watch the download notifications, but I had one client who got his downloads chopped in about 7 months out of 9 without realising.  The other issue with Lloyds is the need to use the pinsentry for every online payment.

Barclays is generally OK, but they have a ridiculously short perid for downloading past transactions - can be as low as a few days if a statement has been issued.  We actually had a case where we couldn't download transactions because a statement had been issued, but coulln't access the statement as it hadn't been uploaded yet.  Ludicrous.  When downloading your date range mustn't begin or end on a day with no transactions, so bad luck if you want Monday to Friday, but there is nothing going on on the Friday.

If you want really poor online banking, Santander is the place to go.  I have a client using it, who got a free "try it out" upgrade to the ahem top level.  First issue is that you have to search for the account that you want to use, each and every time.  He's only got one, but he has to search for it.  Then we noticed that the online statements didn't tell you if the account was in credit or overdrawn.  Seriously.  He goes from £150k credit to about £80 debit and the only way to work out which way he balance lies is to look at the transactions around it, and check if the balance is going up or down,  And the downloads are awful.  You can't just log in and download - you have to schedule a download, and that might not be available for two hours.  You can setup recurring downloads, and we did that, Then we found that some transactions were going through on Saturdays and the download wasn't picking them up.  We're still trying to set up that download - at the moment it duplicates transactions from the week before.  And the information downloaded puts the same verbose rubbish into both the Payee and Description fields.  Truly awful

 

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Replying to WhichTyler:
By williams lester accountants
29th Aug 2014 14:59

Santander

Cloudcounter wrote:

If you want really poor online banking, Santander is the place to go.  

We have used Santander for our own banking for nearly 5 years and don't seem to have any of the issued you specify in your post. Though I do believe it does depend whether the account was previously Abbey, A & L, Cater Allen etc. etc.

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By User deleted
29th Aug 2014 15:47

I have a client on Santander ...

... I find it good, he has a personal account, sole trade account, partnership account and a Limited company account all off a single dashboard - the csv download is OK but you have to de-merge the cells and unwrap the text to be able to mess around withthe data. 

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Replying to Tax Dragon:
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By chatman
02nd Sep 2014 08:34

De-merging and removing formatting

Old Greying Accountant wrote:
download is OK but you have to de-merge the cells and unwrap the text to be able to mess around with the data.

Sounds like trying to use Xero reports.

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