“Please make cheques payable to”

To all businesses: if you make me cross, for whatever reason, I WILL pay you by cheque!

Well, that hasn't been my experience. With my bank you have to go into a branch to request it. I had to use it buying my house and it was a pain.

This will be five CHAPS instructions, so I can't see it being easy at all.

When I do talks I don't mind being paid by cheque as it's a small enough amount to be able to bank through the app. It's big cheques that you can't (or certainly, two years ago coudn't) pay through the app. If it's over a certain amount you have to take the cheque to the bank.

A pp said about posting it to the bank but I thought you had to supply a paying in slip with a cheque sent to the bank. Would they accept it if you just wrote down the account number and sent it with the cheque? Paying in slips used to be in the back of the cheque book that nobody has any more...

Cheques go out of date 6 months after issue so don’t leave it too long.

If I receive a cheque, I post it to my bank and include a note with all my important details on; name, address, account details etc. It’s annoying having to buy a stamp but sometimes it’s the easiest option.

If you need to write a cheque, you need to do it properly otherwise it could get returned to you to do again.

A significant proportion of people under a certain age will never have written a cheque, have probably never seen one and also won't know how they work (eg when the money will be taken from their account), or what to do if they receive one.

They may never have to write one, but it could happen. I've probably only received one or two cheques in the last 10 years, likely due to closing a building society savings account and I've probably written a similar amount. We do have a cheque book for the joint account but it's probably about 20 years old with likely most of the cheques remaining. I also have a second account that I change every so often for the introductory bonus, and I don't think any of those accounts I've opened have ever offered a cheque book.

Weird would be coins; nothing weird about cheques or telephones.

It wont be a person, it will be automated, usually you enter card details etc on keypad and its actually not dissimilar to an app.

Yes, really. There's fecal matter on it.

https://www.londonmet.ac.uk/news/articles/cash-contains-potentially-life-threatening-bacteria-new-tests-find/

I give talks and I love it when I'm paid by cheque! They are so much easier to bank, as a transfer means I have to set them up as a payee on the system and it has to be done in a particular way to ensure the money doesn't just vanish into the big council pot. A cheque or cash (or card over the phone) is one step, a bank transfer is at least three.

I haven't used my own cheque book in years, and am not even sure I know where it is.

Being able to write a cheque is a useful life skill?! How is writing values and dates a life skill?! 🤣

YANBU at all. In my very limited experience of private healthcare it was normally very efficient so this is a bit surprising, and annoying. I don't think I've written a cheque for about 15 years and I have paid in only a few in that time. One of the banks I bank with (Chase) won't let you pay in cheques at all by any method.

There are some driving licence changes that cannot be done online, only via a D1 form and for which you can only pay DVLA by cheque or postal order. And a £20 postal order costs £22.50 and must be paid for in cash, not even a debit card is accepted.

We have some clients pay by cheque (funeral homes) and it is such a faff. I have to record the invoice as paid, fill in a payment slip including their bank details from the cheque, write on the back of the cheque, put it in an envelope that also needs filling in, go to the Post Office and wait 2 weeks. I hate it. I understand them not having a business debit card but they all have bank accounts.

My best friend won’t use a debit or credit card, let alone use telephone or internet banking. She pays for everything by cash.

Have you got a cheque book?
Being able to write a cheque is a useful life skill.
Can't remember last time I wrote a cheque though.

"Cash is dirty (literally! It’s filthy)"

Really? I've just now had a look through some of the notes in my purse and i can't see any dirt or filth on them. Likewise with the coins.

May I ask, do you have any sort of issues around fear of germs or dirt?

This. Not only surgeons but anaesthetists are also self employed byprivate hospitals and send their own invoices separate as well.

Usually invoices have a 30 day payable due date which gives the patient plenty of time to pay it.

I have a friend who won't use internet banking and does everything over the phone. It drives me unreasonably mad when she does the whole 'phoning up and reading out her card number over the phone' thing, so I understand your infuriation. It just seems so unnecessary in this day and age.

Very helpful for older people, who are confident with both those methods. DF recently transferred a lot of money to the wrong place, using a banking app. All gone. Couldn’t have happened with a cheque or phone call.

The surgeons at private hospitals are usually self-employed so payment doesn't go through the hospital but via their private office. The majority of people going to private hospitals will have private health care which settles direct with the surgeon. Whilst I agree cheque is bonkers, it isn't hard to pay over the phone and, as others have said, is standard for things like car insurance if you are paying it in a lump sum.

It's not necessarily obvious to patients, but surgeons at private hospitals aren't usually employed by the hospital. The arrangements are a bit complicated, and it's partly to do with liability, but private surgeons are almost always self-employed.

HMRC is one of the biggest users of cheques.

You can post them to your bank, with a note with your account number etc. To a branch, any branch will do.

I'm having issues with some inheritance I've got to distribute, the beneficiaries don't want cheques and I can only send £25k per day from my bank, so it'll take twelve days to make all the payments. Unless I use CHAPS, which has a cost and from my previous experience of it, can be quite tricky!

I was at uni from 2000 and never wrote cheques for these things. We had a cheque book early 2000s but very rarely used it.

I’ll bet M&S wished people still paid by cheque when the firm lost hundreds of millions in the cyberattack that stopped all card transactions last year. Electronic payments are great until the technology breaks. IMO, we’d be crazy as a society not to keep cash and low tech forms of payment like cheques. The latest LLMs are sophisticated to the point of concern.