A bank mandate, or account signatory, is a person in your business who is authorised to manage your bank account. Most banks offer a range of options dependent on whether you are a business or commercial banking customer. Account signatories can:
Note: All account signatories are officially named as individuals on your business bank account. You can’t list companies on your bank mandate.
Most banks require you to call your relationship manager or to ring up their customer services. You can’t set up a mandate or add or remove people from your bank mandate through regular online banking. Any changes on your mandate may take a few weeks to take effect.
You can add users to your account without making changes to your bank mandate, provided you are a commercial banking customer (i.e. Natwest Bankline or Barclays.Net). As a regular business banking customer you can only add more people to your bank account by making them an account signatory.
Once a bank mandate has been ratified, you will be given your own login and key fob with which to access your bank accounts, removing the need to share banking logins among your finance team.
Most banks also offer a number of different access types. You might be given permission to set up payments, for example, but not to authorise payments, or you may only be given permission to view the bank account in question. These permissions can be tailored to your needs, making a bank mandate a flexible option. For example, Barclays offer dual authorisation upon mandate change.
As accounting firms grow and take on more and more clients, bank mandates can quickly become complicated. You might, for example, have two clients who use the same bank, so you now have two different logins and key fobs to keep track of. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which you enter the wrong details too many times and end up locking a client’s account.
Realistically, your clients will use a number of different banks, each with their own payment flows and permissions. Additionally, there is no universal standard for payment files, as each bank accepts a slightly different format. All of this adds up to extra training for your staff, and an even greater risk of making a costly mistake.
As an alternative to bank mandates, accounting firms could make use of client accounts or tools such as Telleroo that let you securely make payments on behalf of clients.
Being included on a bank mandate is a huge responsibility for the person named as the account signatory as they can communicate with the bank on your business's behalf. Its important to only add people to your bank mandate who you fully trust to handle your finances. A few other things to consider:
There are options available to you when looking for ways to delegate your business's finance with adding people to your bank mandate.
You either sign up to become a corporate customer or you take advantage of a modern commercial payments systems such as Telleroo. Using a Corporate Banking System can be clunky. Instead, we have designed a clean user interface allowing you to to add or remove users easily, whilst maintaining security. With Telleroo you can add as many users as you’d like and you can allocate various access levels such as:
Want to see how we can make your payments pain free? Sign your business up for Telleroo today or, if you're an accountant or bookkeeper in practice, check out our partner programme.
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