Santander business account
Discussion
Hi all,
I'm currently with HSBC and I've been happy enough with them and used to use them in previous working elements I've been involved with.
For my currently small, business - I've been with HSBC small business banking and am looking to expand my business and of course that means more regular and larger amounts coming into the account.
I had a letter drop through the door for the free business current account and have been tempted to give them a call and potentially transfer.
I'm going to be selling directly via my website and taking Paypal only at this stage, I made the decision not to use Ebay, and thus another bonus is not being hit by ebay fees as well, I'll only have the Paypal fees. I'm then thinking of keeping a large balance in the Paypal account and perhaps only transferring an as yet to be decided amount into the business bank account each month or even every quarter only. Most of my suppliers are based in the US and as such Paypal offers an easy way to pay them, and so far that's what they've requested.
In the future I'll probably want to have a merchant account so as I can take credit card payments from the big card issuers as per the norm for online shopping/business.
Would it be better to stick with HSBC overall, take the 'usual' business banking charges on the chin, or would it indeed be better to actually give A&L/Satander a go?!
I know it's a bit of an open ended question, but more than likely I won't need to go for the negative aspects that's been posted above.
Any thoughts/feedback gratefully recieved!
cheers, Dennis! West London & Slough UK!
I'm currently with HSBC and I've been happy enough with them and used to use them in previous working elements I've been involved with.
For my currently small, business - I've been with HSBC small business banking and am looking to expand my business and of course that means more regular and larger amounts coming into the account.
I had a letter drop through the door for the free business current account and have been tempted to give them a call and potentially transfer.
I'm going to be selling directly via my website and taking Paypal only at this stage, I made the decision not to use Ebay, and thus another bonus is not being hit by ebay fees as well, I'll only have the Paypal fees. I'm then thinking of keeping a large balance in the Paypal account and perhaps only transferring an as yet to be decided amount into the business bank account each month or even every quarter only. Most of my suppliers are based in the US and as such Paypal offers an easy way to pay them, and so far that's what they've requested.
In the future I'll probably want to have a merchant account so as I can take credit card payments from the big card issuers as per the norm for online shopping/business.
Would it be better to stick with HSBC overall, take the 'usual' business banking charges on the chin, or would it indeed be better to actually give A&L/Satander a go?!
I know it's a bit of an open ended question, but more than likely I won't need to go for the negative aspects that's been posted above.
Any thoughts/feedback gratefully recieved!
cheers, Dennis! West London & Slough UK!
DennisCooper said:
I'm going to be selling directly via my website and taking Paypal only at this stage, I made the decision not to use Ebay, and thus another bonus is not being hit by ebay fees as well, I'll only have the Paypal fees. I'm then thinking of keeping a large balance in the Paypal account and perhaps only transferring an as yet to be decided amount into the business bank account each month or even every quarter only.
This is exactly how I operate. You can get a csv export from Paypal showing sales and their charges which I pump directly into my accounts in Excel, plus of course you can buy and print postage directly from Paypal and print packing notes as well. The only downside I have found with Paypal so far is that for some reason if you have a UK Paypal account you can only have one shipping cost per product. You have to have a US Paypal account to be able to set up multiple shipping costs per product. So in my case, all the products are set up with UK P&P and if a customer outside of the UK wants to order something they have to Paypal us some additional funds to cover the costs. Bit of a PITA but Paypal is by far the cheapest solution to get you going for online retailing, the merchant accounts and CC payment processing costs mean you need a decent flow of sales to make it worthwhile.
Edited by mattdaniels on Sunday 14th February 06:56
sgrimshaw said:
mattdaniels said:
My business account is with Abbey/Santander. Into year two of trading now. They are excellent, never had a problem with them.
+13 years for us, no problems.
RichBurley said:
sgrimshaw said:
mattdaniels said:
My business account is with Abbey/Santander. Into year two of trading now. They are excellent, never had a problem with them.
+13 years for us, no problems.
Ask it in English and you might get an answer.
sgrimshaw said:
RichBurley said:
sgrimshaw said:
mattdaniels said:
My business account is with Abbey/Santander. Into year two of trading now. They are excellent, never had a problem with them.
+13 years for us, no problems.
Ask it in English and you might get an answer.
I'm just saying, you said you've never had a problem. But if same day payments took 3 days, I'd think that was a problem. I sometimes need to do same day payments in my line of work. So, do you happen to know if it is true that same day payments take 3 days?
Thanks,
Rich
I think it's about finding what is appropriate to your business.
We banked with A&L Commercial Bank at the start. Mainly because it was free. So you could deposit cheques (by the post, there was no counter service), receive payments by BACS / CHAPS and send out as many cheques as you want for free.
However, as the business grew, we found we couldn't integrate the A&L statements into Sage, they were not compatible. Then we found out we had no way of organising an overdraft / credit cards etc. Depositing cash meant going to the Post Office, and there was no way of setting up electronic payments for a website.
So we swapped to Barclays. Who now charge us for writing cheques, so everything gets paid by Faster Payments or BACS. The rest of the services are available and utilised as and when we need them.
We banked with A&L Commercial Bank at the start. Mainly because it was free. So you could deposit cheques (by the post, there was no counter service), receive payments by BACS / CHAPS and send out as many cheques as you want for free.
However, as the business grew, we found we couldn't integrate the A&L statements into Sage, they were not compatible. Then we found out we had no way of organising an overdraft / credit cards etc. Depositing cash meant going to the Post Office, and there was no way of setting up electronic payments for a website.
So we swapped to Barclays. Who now charge us for writing cheques, so everything gets paid by Faster Payments or BACS. The rest of the services are available and utilised as and when we need them.
With banking facilities that are offered for £300,000 plus accounts, it really seems to depend on the branch/business manager. Our Barclays corporate account is great, another Barclays account (not with the corporate team, but with a smaller regular branch) we have for a smaller business is pretty crap.
The Santander account is free, and does what it is supposed to do, but don't expect any great service from it. BACS payments are NOT same day, unlike Barclays/HSBC/NatWest etc. You CANNOT use the normal branch cashier to pay in a cheque (even though they give you paying in books) and expect to deal with an Indian call centre from time to time, who may just accidentally cancel one of your debit cards leading to a whole load of grief when your payments get cancelled... You can request a faxpay service though.
At the end of the day, if you have a LOT of transactions on your bank account (and I mean in terms of count not value) then it can work out to be quite cost effective (to give an idea we save about £500 in fees per year). What I would suggest though is to have another backup account to forward your money to. The Santander account literally takes money in and we forward batches of money to our other (Natwest) account from time to time.
The Santander account is free, and does what it is supposed to do, but don't expect any great service from it. BACS payments are NOT same day, unlike Barclays/HSBC/NatWest etc. You CANNOT use the normal branch cashier to pay in a cheque (even though they give you paying in books) and expect to deal with an Indian call centre from time to time, who may just accidentally cancel one of your debit cards leading to a whole load of grief when your payments get cancelled... You can request a faxpay service though.
At the end of the day, if you have a LOT of transactions on your bank account (and I mean in terms of count not value) then it can work out to be quite cost effective (to give an idea we save about £500 in fees per year). What I would suggest though is to have another backup account to forward your money to. The Santander account literally takes money in and we forward batches of money to our other (Natwest) account from time to time.
I use Cater Allen Private Bank for the business accounts (it's a division of Santander). I've used them now for 5 years and I cannot praise them enough.
Fantastic service, friendly people, English call centres with immediate answer by a real person, no charges, online banking.
Never had a problem.
Fantastic service, friendly people, English call centres with immediate answer by a real person, no charges, online banking.
Never had a problem.
3 years with Santander here (formerly Abbey) no issues, the account does what I need and costs me nothing.
Have never had a need to make same day transfers, but the no counter service is slightly annoying.
They also cannot provide a US$ or Euro account, so I'm off to Cater Allen for that.
Have never had a need to make same day transfers, but the no counter service is slightly annoying.
They also cannot provide a US$ or Euro account, so I'm off to Cater Allen for that.
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