Financial Management

How to choose a Bank

How to chose a Bank:  You may have a number of Banks operating in your area.  At times we may find it difficult to chose a particular bank.  Some of the points that one needs to look at before opening a Bank Account are as follows:

   When you want to open an account with a particular bank, check whether the bank has branches nearer to your project area.

  - Check the capacity of the bank – particularly some smaller branches may have limitations of drawing cash in a particular day.

  - Check with the bank what are the facilities that they are going to offer your organization. e.g. some banks give facility to make demand drafts without any charges.

  - Check if they offer overdraft facility

- Check if they have loan facility

-If your project has large transactions, some banks consider you as a valued customer and give priority when you do some transactions.

- For some reason or other when a cheque issued by your organization comes to your bank for clearance and if they found the cheque is invalid for various reasons, before they bounce the cheque, they will contact you.

-At times you need to draw cash urgently and you found the bank hours are over, as a valued customer the bank may allow you to draw the cash if their books are not closed for that day.

- In small branches and particularly in rural areas the banks do not give cheque books as many as you require because of shortage or other reasons.  This also you need to ensure that your organization gets sufficient cheque book facility.

- Also see whether banks have electronically money transfer facility.

 -Also find out whether that particular branch has facility to receive funds directly from outside your country. 

You should also get the Bank’s Swift Code, Intermediary Bank Account number etc. which you need to send to your donors for transferring funds into your account.

 - After opening the account after some time, the concerned staff with whom your organization has good rapport may have been transferred to other places or left the job.  In such situation,  the concerned staff before they leave that particular branch should introduce you  to the new member and explains to them about your organization and the facilities that your organization is supposed to get.   

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