What’s the straight dope on banking hours? My bank stops prcessing deposits at 2pm, and closes the doors at 5pm. No other place where I do business has such inconvenient hours.
I can accept that, at some point in the past, banks had to stop accepting new transactions at 2pm, so that an accountant or seven would be able to actuially process them. But these days, I cannot imagine that any transaction excepting a third party personal check would take longer than three seconds to approve, any hour of the day or night. So why the hoops? What are they doing after 2 which is different from what’s done before 2?
Inertia? If it worked in the past and people aren’t complaining loudly about it, maybe the bank doesn’t see the need to change. My bank is open well into the evenings (9PM I think).
I’ll try. The hours the doors are open are to accomodate the public and merchants.
All deposits are proofed or verified at the local branches before going the the central processing center where they are credited to your account(s) and the check sent to the bank of origin. Check-21 is changing that to electronic transmission of the images of the check.
Seems simple enough unless you want to write a check and cash it on the spot. In that case consider a credit card and charge cash to it.
short answer, from when I worked in a bank. it takes several hours to close out the bank. Each station must be totalled against all cash, incoming checks, outgoing checks etc. Then usually a more senior teller checks the work of the more junior tellers. Usually no teller can leave until all tellers have equaled out or accounted for any errors. Any overage or underage is noted in your record. At the bank where I worked, when your +/- reached $200, you received a warning. When it reached $400, you were fired. (however, +/- under $10 did not “count” towards your total).
The actual time needed to prepare the checks to be sent down to central processing is minimal. Tallying, triple-checking, and security are what takes so long. (even with computers, sometimes it takes a while to figure out where the error is when the balances don’t add up).
If the bank closes at 3, the staff generally doesn’t leave until between 5 and 6.
My wife works at a bank as a teller. This particular bank is open until three except on thursday and friday (the busiest two days of the week).
Even when they close at three they often don’t get done until five or six. They have to balance out all of the drawers plus the vault. Then if they don’t have time durng the day they have to balance out the mac machines and process night drops from businesses.
Like another poster said: If they don’t balance out, then nobody can leave until the money (transaction)is found or the teller gives up and accepts the loss (which usually loses their bonus for the entire month).
The 2pm cutoff was put in place to allow banks to process the transactions and get the paper to the Federal Reserve Banks on time for further routing. I’ll briefly outline the process:
All transactions received between the time the bank opens and 2:00 are bundled together and transported to the “proof” department. This may be within the branch at small banks or, more likely, at a centralized operations center.
The proof operators key the amount data from each individual piece of paper in a bundle of transactions (checks, deposit slips, etc) into a machine which encodes the amount on the MICR line at the bottom of the check. The machine also encodes an identifier on the MICR line indicating whether the item is a debit or credit.
Each bundle of work must be in balance (debits=credits), or “proved” before the bundle can travel to the next step. Any out of balance bundle must be corrected.
The proved bundles go to the sorter room. Here huge machines sort the paper based on MICR line data that shows where it needs to be routed next - credits and “on-us” checks are sorted to a pocket (or pockets) to stay at this bank, local checks are routed to a pocket to go to the local clearing house, checks on banks that are in the same state but not considered local are pocketed to go to another clearing house, out of state checks are pocketed to go to the appropriate Federal Reserve Bank branch for further sorting. Depending on the volume of transactions processed, each routing point may require multiple pockets. I have seen an operations center in LA that ran 75 sorters. Each sorter is about 40’ long, had 36 pockets, weighs about a ton and costs about $1MM. This ops center processed the transactions for the southern California branches of one bank - about 10 million pieces of paper per day.
The sorted bundles are packaged for delivery to the appropriate clearing house or FRB branch. Each clearing house and FRB branch has strict deadlines for receiving work, usually around midnight. If a bank misses a deadline it can cost a bundle of money in penalties.
All the MICR line data for the credits and on-us checks are collated to a flat file for processing by the bank mainframe. This is when transactions are posted to your account, usually around midnight.
The processing of paper in the banking industry is a vast, time consuming task. The 2:00 cutoff gives the bank about 10 hours to do all of the above - including the time it takes to courier the paper from the branches to the ops center and from the ops center to the clearing house. It really is a small miracle that happens every day, all over the country.
Check 21, the electronic posting of checks, will greatly reduce the volume of paper in (and in time eliminate) steps 4-6, speeding up the process. My bank has already extended the cutoff time from 2:00 to 5:00.
Depending on where you are located, this doesn’t have to be the case. My bank stays open until 8:00pm six days a week. YMMV.
