Recording what happened at the bank

When a payment sheet comes back from the bank, somebody at LEAT writes
down what they were told. This page is about what that record is, and
what it is not.

It is a recorded observation, and it says so

Every one of these records carries this sentence, in these words:

A recorded observation. Somebody at LEAT wrote down what they saw or
were told about the signing at the bank. LEAT did not witness a
signature, did not verify one, and holds no evidence of one.

That is not a disclaimer somebody added to be careful. It is what the
record actually is.

What you record

The method (cheque or internet banking), the reference — a cheque number
or a bank batch reference — when it was submitted, and the names of the
people who signed, written as they appear on the mandate.

The names are text. They are not linked to LEAT accounts, because the
people who sign at the bank do not sign as LEAT users, and a system that
pretended otherwise would let anybody with a login be recorded as a bank
signatory.

LEAT's copy of the bank mandate

LEAT keeps a copy of who the bank allows to sign. The copy gives nobody
any power inside LEAT. It is used for exactly two things:

• stopping somebody who signs at the bank from also recording that the bank signed;
• warning you when the names you have written down are not on the copy.

The second is a warning, not a refusal. Our copy may simply be out of
date, and refusing would stop a real payment being recorded because our
paperwork is behind.

If LEAT has no copy on file

The recording still goes ahead. It is marked as not checked, in those
words, and an exception opens so somebody re-enters the copy from the
mandate document.

Blocking every payment until somebody rescans a document would punish the
wrong problem. But the record has to say which happened: "we checked and
it was clean" and "there was nothing to check against" are opposite
facts.

The copy is judged as it stood at the time

A recording made in June is checked against the mandate copy that was in
force in June, for ever. Reissuing the mandate later does not turn a
clean recording into a violation, and it does not clear a real one.

Recording it does not pay anybody

After you record a submission, the payments say "submitted to bank". They
do not say paid, and they will not until the bank statement arrives.