Ah, the joys of FNB business banking

One of the worst insults you can give me is to tell me I sound like Tony Leon. However, sometimes all I want to do is stand on a bench and whine about everything.

Let’s sketch a scenario. A business opens an FNB business cheque account. Everyone think’s it’s great – the interface is simple (nicer than Nedbank’s, which I also use regularly, and the old 20Twenty or Icanonline, the others I’ve experienced in depth). Over the course of business they build up, say 200 recipent profiles of various suppliers, all of which may need to be paid at some point.

Then the accountant leaves. To smooth the transition, the stand-in accountant ends up using the old accountant’s profile to log in and everything continues as normal. At some point, the business decides to do the right thing and get the stand-in accountant to use his own profile. About 4 hours of filling out forms and, mostly, waiting, in a branch miles from the stand-in accountant’s home ensues. He leaves the bank with access still not working, but a promise that everything will be fine by 5.30pm.

At 8pm he logs in. Hooray, he’s in. He takes the pile of 50 urgent invoices and clicks on pay recipient. There’s nothing there. None of the recipients have been moved across. He clicks on payment history. There’s none. The entire history (besides statements) of the business has been lost. He guesses it’s a simple glitch that the recipients haven’t been transferred to his profile, and phones the helpline. Only to be told there’s no way this can be done, and he must recapture all of the recipients again, manually.

For f&*%%ck’s sake! Can you imagine Pick ‘n Pay changing accountants and being told they must manually recapture the details of all 10 000 suppliers?!

Technorati tag: FNB