We have a few international customers who pay our invoices in EURO into our EURO bank account. On few occasions recently, we have only received the payments net off bank charges.
Our customers now argue that they sent a full payment, however we have only received a part of it. Its not the case with all payments but some of them come short of around either E15.00 or E75.00, and as you can imagine it all adds up.
On sage I only put the amount we receive as CR so it matches the bank balance.
I would really appreciate your comments. One of the customers said that in order to pay anything extra they would need a separate invoice, but I cant invoice again for the same thing!
I also don't know how to treat it in Sage if we end up not receiving the difference, in odrer to clean up customer balances.
It is not your burden to pay your clients bank charges however, just check that they the clients charges and not your own.
I know, teaching my grannie to suck eggs and all that but the obvious is sometimes easy to miss.
If in any doubt talk to the bank who will be helpful for this sort of thing.
If the client is paying by transfer from their account to yours rather than over the counter then the fees should not be part of the transaction. However if they are paying at a bank that is not their own or via something like Western Union then fee's may be charged from the amount transferred but they should have been made aware of this and paid the additional amount for the fees which they now owe to you instead.
At the end of the day, unless the fee's are on your side then the clients account is in arrears by the amount of the bank charges.
kind regards,
Shaun.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
I had checked with our bank and the charges weren't ours.
What they told me was, that when creating an international payment instruction, any bank would ask whether the charges associated with the transfer are to be paid by the sender or the beneficiary.
According to my company's contracts terms and conditions all bank fees must be paid by the customer. Our bank does not charge anything extra for receiving the payment.
