| | Banking : Standing Orders and Direct Debits | 
|
|
Most people have to make regular payments for services that they receive. For example :
1.
| People who are buying a house have to make mortgage payments every month.
| 2.
| Most people pay for electricity, telephone and gas services every three months.
| 3.
| Other items such as insurance, television licence and subscriptions can also be
paid for monthly.
| |
Making each of these payments manually would be time consuming and error prone, so instead Direct Debits and Standing Orders can be used to make regular payments automatically.
| Standing Order | Used to make a regular payment of a known amount. e.g. £356.71 every month to pay for a mortgage on a house. |
| Direct Debit | Used to make a regular payment when the amount to pay varies. e.g. used to pay a gas bill every three months when the amount to pay depends upon how much gas you have used. The company that is being paid will request the correct amount from your bank. |
For each account a bank will store a list of regular payments that should be made in its database. Here is a list of regular payments to be made from one account which has been extracted from a bank database :
| Type | Pay To | Sort Code | Account No | Frequency | Payment Day | Next Payment | Amount
| SO
| Bury Bank
| 54-10-23
| 93739202
| Monthly
| 14
| 14/4/2001
| £356.71
| SO
| GW Insurance
| 40-10-75
| 10891026
| Monthly
| 16
| 16/4/2001
| £42.10
| DD
| JB Cellular
| 22-32-12
| 21030129
| Monthly
| 12
| 12/4/2001
| N/A
| DD
| Bolton Gas
| 82-10-04
| 43239309
| 3-Monthly
| 15
| 15/6/2001
| N/A
| Key : SO = Standing Order, DD = Direct Debit
| | |||||||
The database calculates the Next Payment date from the Frequency and Payment Day. A query is used to produce a list of all of the payments that must be made on a particular day. The Pay To, Sort Code and Account No fields are used to identify the account that the money should be transferred into.
Automatic payments like this could not be made if a manual information system was used. The amount of work involved in identifying and making the payments would make it impractical.
GCSE ICT Companion 04 - (C) P Meakin 2004