By Davide Laguardia – The other day, over a coffee with colleagues, a discussion arose on a very particular trait of the average Italian saver: we are in 2017 and a myriad of people still go to the bank to view the balance of their current account. What is it, if not a real waste of time? Taking a look at your bank statement is a trivial operation that can be done comfortably from your PC, or from your smartphone or tablet.
In addition to checking the movements of their account, many current account holders do not know that most of the most common banking operations can be carried out from home, comfortably seated, for free and often in less than 5 minutes. In this way you avoid going to the bank, perhaps wasting time in the heat, or waiting for the end of a kilometer-long queue.
1. View current account transactions: normally, the bank records all the operations we carry out, both incoming (when our salary or pension is credited to us, or if we receive a bank transfer), and when we make expenses, from the single purchase in a shop to the payment of the utility bill. electricity. All these operations are recorded in a page, whose net result (the sum of negative and positive numbers) is called the balance. It is a simple report, which tracks both cash inflows (“credit” movements) and outflows (“debit” movements), providing both the amount and a brief description of the cash flow. The colors or the position of the columns may vary slightly from bank to bank, but in essence this is the information provided. To view your account, just request internet banking at the branch, i.e. the platform that allows online access: after receiving an access code and password, it takes a few minutes to see all the account movements and the balance. The balance, for convenience, is divided into current balance and account balance, but we will explain the difference in the next paragraph.
2. Check the progress of your account statement: iIn this way we can find more detailed information, such as past account movements (even for several months), information on the tax regime or on the use of any credit or debit cards.
3. Arrange a wire transfer: instead of wasting time in the bank, as well as paper and ink, just type five data from your PC. At the end of the day, the fields to fill in are always the same: the person to whom we want to transfer the money, called the beneficiary; the amount to be transferred; the IBAN of the beneficiary, which is nothing more than a sort of tax code of the beneficiary's current account, allowing for secure identification; and, lastly, the causal, i.e. the reason for the transfer of the money (rent, purchase, sale, donation, non-interest bearing loan, etc.).
4. Paying for utilities: most internet banking now offers special sections where it is possible to have special payments, such as water, electricity and gas utilities, or pay MAV bills for university fees and so on. In some cases this is possible by having the monthly fee debited directly with an automatic system called RID, which stands for Direct Interbank Relationship: a simple and brief exchange of data between the bank and the entity providing the service to be paid is sufficient. All doable from our home PC.
5. Top up your phone: Forget cards and tobacco shops: telephone top-ups can be done in just a few clicks from your online current account, just access the specific function present in each internet banking and enter the telephone number you wish to top-up and the top-up amount. As easy as drinking a glass of water.
Eye! Account balance, current balance and currency
As we mentioned before, the balance can be divided into current balance and account balance; the difference between the two lies in the actual disposition of the money. If, for example, we carried out an operation on Saturday morning and after 30 seconds we checked the balance online at the bank, we would notice that the current balance is updated, unlike the accounting balance: this is because the banks will carry out the accounting entry operation some day after (in our case during the first working day). Precisely for this reason there is a difference between the accounting date and the value date. The accounting date is the date on which we performed the operation, the value date is the one with which our bank records it, a concept that we will explore in a future post.
