What a payment costs

Some rails are free to send on. Others charge per payment, and that charge is passed on to the account the money comes out of.

Your organisation decides which rails cost money, and how much, without a code change. A rail with no price is free. A rail with a price of zero is also free — useful when staff accounts pay nothing and everyone else pays the standard fee.

What you see before you send

When you choose a destination on a priced rail, the screen shows two figures:

Figure	What it means
Payment fee	The fee including tax, for this payment on this rail
Total reserved	The payment plus the fee — the amount held against the balance

You see both before you submit. The fee is never a surprise at the end.

The balance has to cover both

A payment holds the amount and its fee against the available balance. That is one hold, not two, and it is released when the payment settles.

So an account cannot pay away every last cent on a priced rail. Paying the full balance leaves nothing to pay the fee with, and the payment is refused with the fee named.

An account with 1,000.00 and a 57.50 fee can send 942.50. The hold is 1,000.00 — the payment plus the fee.

Closing an account is the exception. A closure pays out the balance less the fee, so the closing statement reads balance, less fee, net paid. There is nothing left over to be short of.

What the customer’s statement shows

Two entries: the payment, and the fee beside it.

The fee is never taken out of the payment amount. Netting them would leave the tax with no line of its own, and the payment would no longer match what the clearing scheme settled.

When the fee is charged, and when it comes back

flowchart TD
    A["Payment raised<br/>fee quoted and held"] --> B["Approved<br/>fee re-checked"]
    B --> C["Submitted<br/>fee charged"]
    C --> D{"Scheme response"}
    D -- "Settled" --> E["Fee stands"]
    D -- "Refused" --> F["Fee and its tax reversed"]

The fee is fixed when the payment is raised, so the figure you saw is the figure the approver sees. If someone edits the price in between, approval refuses and re-quotes rather than charging an amount nobody agreed to.

If the scheme refuses the payment, the fee and its tax come back. You are not billed for a payment that never went.

Who bears the charge

Normally the payer bears it: the beneficiary receives the full amount, and the fee is charged on top.

A rail can be set so the beneficiary bears it instead. The beneficiary then receives the amount less the fee, and the payer’s total outlay is unchanged. Use this only where the scheme’s rules or the agreement say so — deducting a fee from a contractual payment means paying less than is owed.

This follows the ISO 20022 charge-bearer code set, so a rail configured here means the same thing on the wire.

When there is no customer account

A payment made from your organisation’s own account has nobody to charge, so no fee is worked out and none is posted.

What your organisation configures

Which rails carry a price, and which price it is
What that price is on each price list — so a staff account can pay nothing while a standard account pays the full fee
Who bears the charge on each rail
Which ledger accounts the fee income and its tax go to

Related: how a payment picks its rail.