Some general points here on some of the things that have been written in this thread about receiving BACS payments. Obviously my comments are limited to my own experiences.
Santander do show the references these days - even to former Abbey customers. However, they totally lost my trust by taking 6 months to admit to the problem and another year to put it right. Apart from a couple of jobs that I didn't get around to changing, all BACS payments go to another bank these days. Santander's loss.
Right then.
1) When receiving a BACS payment, only supply the customer with a reference that stays the same (I use house number or first 4 digits of house name + postcode). No invoice numbers. No dates. This is because if a customer has to alter any small detail to send by BACS, they usually have to set up the entire payment from scratch - a hassle for them. There are good reasons for this. If an account gets hacked, a common way to syphon off funds is by altering the sort code/account number on an outgoing BACS payment to an account to which the fraudster has access. Therefore, when a new BACS payment is set up, the bank insists on independent verification that it is legit. Some banks supply a card reader. Some supply a token that generates random numbers. Some supply a random number by text. If you make a customer alter a detail each time they pay you, they will have to go through this process every time. This means that they probably won't pay you by BACS.
2) Do not rely on recognising the customers' surnames. Apart from surnames seldom being unique, some banks display a truncated entry which can mean that you don't get to see it. Indeed I know of one bank (IF - Intelligent Finance) who seem to show a random string of characters rather than the customers' names - though the reference is intact. I don't know of any others that do this but there may be some out there.
3) Use unique identifiers on the reference. Even number + roadname is not unique. Although very unusual, I have had customers at the same address (e.g. 1 Acacia Gardens) but in different towns. Usually there will be something else that is different between them such as name or amount paid - but this can't be totally relied upon.
In spite of all this and giving out a pre-printed form containing their unique reference, I still have a couple of custies who put "Windows" as the reference. So I sometimes wonder why I bother. Fortunately, they have different surnames (they use banks that display them) and the amounts are different. So you can get away with it so long as it's only a few and you make a note of it. Usually I can remember these things but sometimes not.
