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Comment by blueblisters | Hacker News Reader

> It is not in the slightest bit uncommon to receive an invoice with four or five EUR bank accounts printed on it. You can randomly pick your "preferred" account to pay to and the company's accountant will rebalance the accounts at the end of the quarter (or wahtever).

Why ask the customer to pick? Why not generate invoices with a randomly picked bank account (which can also lend itself to automatic rebalancing)?

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If you send a different bank account every month to many companies, it’s going to get flagged by fraud checks in a lot of ERP/AP systems. (We have vendor records, including the payment bank account number. If your invoice matches and passes internal checks [we received the goods, we have money in the cost center, address/account numbers match, etc], it gets smoothly paid as agreed. If you rotate bank account numbers, it’s going to be kicked out to be manually checked and you’re going to get paid late.)

You could load-balance once per-customer and not trip this, but that doesn’t get you fully automatic rebalancing.

Also smaller less sophisticated vendors (I include my company in this) simply enter your remittance information once in their banking system on the first invoice. We aren't going to want to update it every time.

They could have it randomize per vendor I suppose but all that is a lot of hassle when you can just put five accounts in the Payment Advice field in your accounting software and let the vendors do with it as they choose.

One more reason that comes to mind. Customers probably would choose the account in same bank as they have their account. Thus instant transfers. Which used to mean getting money possibly days earlier.

Why ask the customer to pick? Why not generate invoices with a randomly picked bank account (which can also lend itself to automatic rebalancing)?

The simple answer to this is because "Payment Advice" is a big text field in your accounting software and "Randomize per invoice" or "Randomize per vendor" isn't an option it has.

One reason is that a money transfer within one bank is usually faster and might be more secure because some banks check the name agains the account number. For this reason customers perfer to use an account with their own bank.

> Why ask the customer to pick? Why not generate invoices with a randomly picked bank account (which can also lend itself to automatic rebalancing)?

Would be interesting to learn if they give the list in the same order always or if they randomize the order of the account numbers listed, DNS round robin style :)

> Why ask the customer to pick? Why not generate invoices with a randomly picked bank account (which can also lend itself to automatic rebalancing)?

Maybe its just my perspective having (mostly) dealt with SME's. I would guess larger companies are more clever about it (e.g. perhaps they have one "receipt" account and then the money gets automatically spread out from there once received).

Invoices list multiple bank accounts at different banks because of transfer fees and delays.

Fees are usually lowest and the transfer is fastest if source and destination accounts are at the same bank.

Slovenia has 5 or so popular banks. Thus it’s feasable for a company to cover banks of most payees.

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