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Is it usual to be charges to use BPAY to pay levies? In our building the Owners Corporation is charged $1.65 per transaction and it is called a bank fee.
A $5.50 processing payment applies to Levy payments by EFT.
Just wondering if these fees are common place?
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We now use EFT and Bpay rather than cheques. From the experience of our strata, I can say NO! It is not usual. Nor should you accept it. Our strata was charged $1 for every cheque we drew, we then changed to doing all our transactions on line and we now get no charges.
As I understand the current state of financial deregulation such fees and charges are up to each bank or financial institution. If the fee is charged because you use a credit card and the fee is charged by the card company that is a different argument.
Look around and negotiate with your financial institution. We use a Building Society. All the executive has access to the account and each BPay or EFT has to be authorised electronically by two members of the executive. In terms of transparency and accountablity moving to electronic online transactions has been a real boon to our strata!
There are a couple of possible scenarios here.
First, it is usual for financial institutions to raise those fees, although most don’t apply them to payments made from savings/cheque accounts as opposed to from credit accounts. So far as I’m aware, the fees are either paid by the payer at the time of the transaction, or the payee or “merchant” can make those payments and absorb them, or make them and pass them on. So could it be that your Owners Corporation is making those fee payments and showing them as bank fees on the Accounts?
Secondly, if you have a Strata Manager (SM), they could have negotiated the B’Pay™ facility with their financial institution and it could be the SM’s fee for managing that facility that appears in your Owners Corporation’s accounts. I’m thinking that this could be the case, as “processing fees” for payments made by EFT are not usually made by financial institutions directly.
If you can clarify the source of the fees as opposed to what they’re for, I’m sure that contributors to this forum will provide further advice/comment.
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