Smaller businesses and in particular the self-employed like me will be delighted with the confirmation that the new fast clearance of payments into the banking system is coming this week. From now on when you put a cheque into your bank or when someone pays you electronically it won’t take the regulation three days to clear.

Actually money into my business bank take even longer, with one individual having initiated an electronic transfer last Tuesday and I still don’t have it (well, they say it went through last Tuesday and they’ve been reliable in the past). The new system instigated yesterday doesn’t seem to have speeded it along at all.

This is of course the real problem with payments and cash flow. People don’t always pay when they say they will. It’ not always their fault; one freelance commissioned me for a piece of work a while back and has been unable to pay me because her (inevitably larger) client hadn’t coughed up themselves. Payment for this ‘ere blog, meanwhile, are made at the same time each month regularly as you please and yes, they’ll now turn up a day or two earlier but I don’t really care - it’s the regularity and predictability of when these things will arrive that makes the difference, not the fact that the banks have - selectively if the BBC report is accurate - started to get slightly faster in their internal processes.

Of course it’s always been absurd that when I can pay for an Amazon purchase automatically it still takes over five working days for someone to get cash from their account into mine, particularly when we share the same bank. But this isn’t the great event some of the participants have been making out - it’s a tweak, no more than that.

BACS | Bank | electronic transaction