Kay , did the search , 24 items come up and nothing regarding the question comes out.
I was dealing with a cell phone company just the other day regarding a payment , and the first drone in Customer service was explaining that a payment made could take up to 10 days.
The second person I talked to stated that the payment would only take 6 days , so I am getting better here , lopping off 4 whole days.
But it really was flabbergasting to find out that it could actually take this long.
My take on this was that there is three partys involved , me , the bank, and the vendor that the payment is going to.
Kay , here it is 4:30am since I work Afternoon shift . I pay a bill
Company pays me on thursday through direct deposit ( actually they deposit the money probably a lot earlier in the week , it only gets released on Thurs.)
Then I pay the bill
So I imagine from this moment , the money thats allocated to the bill payment goes into some sort of escrow account , to prove that I actually have the money.Then it gets electronically moved to the vendor that its being payed to.
From here I am lost as to what happens next
What exactly is the flow process from the time I hit click to the time the vendor gets the money.
In my experience a deposit made by 3:00 PM is posted overnight.
Bill payments set up for a certain date in advance are collected by demand overnight.
Your cellphone company may have an internal processing delay. If you set it up with them for demand payment on a certain day of the month it should be done then.
Electronic payroll deposits are made on say Thursday for overnight posting for Friday availability to you.
If you are paying your cell phone bill through the cell phone company’s website, you will usually have your bank account debited directly, or use a credit/debit card. These should post to your account immediately.
If you are using your bank’s bill pay, they may be cutting a paper check to your cell phone company and MAILING it to them. Paying this way can take up to 10 business days to post to your account. Call your bank to find out how they are making the payment if this the option you have chosen.
Hmm, maybe it’s different here in the UK, but if I pay a bill online, it can take anywhere in between a day and five to get through. This depends on a number of things - which banks/buliding societies your paying from/to (if it’s the same one, usually the payment is pretty instant), what kind of account you have, whether it’s a weekend and what colour your front door is.
There’s no actual reason for the bank/building society to hold your money for this long, as far as I can see. They just do it because they can.
I use BankOne bill pay – I’ve checked with lots of other banks and they’re similar: It used to be that electronic payments would be made in one or two days, and they’d charge you $5 per month for bill pay. To make it “more convienient” for customers, they dropped the fee and made everything very, very complicated. Now as you mentioned, they take the money out of your account, sit on it a few days, and then make the instant payment. But at least it’s free! :smack: Oh, wait! Paper checks are worse! It used to be that the bank would mail a laser draft of your own checks. They cleared like regular checks. But with the new and improved banking, they take your money right away, mail their own check, and you really never know when it clears or when it was deposited, because it’s not your check. All you see is the “sent on” date as being when the money was removed from your account. If the check is lost in the mail, you’ll never know until you start getting nasty letters from your payee!
In the distant past before online banking existed, I used CheckFree. For $10 per month, they still do electronic payments the “right way.” – I’ve just not moved to them yet, but I mean to, just so problems like the OP’s don’t occur.