Regulation 12

Payment to a Town Council may be made, in order of preference, through the following means:

Cashless payments should be encouraged and may be made by electronic fund transfers, cheques, money orders, postal orders or cashier’s orders.

The secretary should, wherever possible, encourage payments by means of electronic fund transfers over other forms of cashless payment.

Where a fee or charge is payable to the collection agent for electronic fund transfer services, the prior approval of the chairman or an officer authorised by the chairman shall be obtained.

Apart from cheques, money orders, postal orders or cashier’s orders, electronic transfer services provided by banks such as the following should be used to collect payments to a Town Council:

Where there is no necessity to provide counter service to the public at the point of collection and cash payment is unavoidable, automated collection machines such as note-recognition machines may be used to accept cash.

Where there is a need to provide counter service to the public, payments should, wherever possible, be made through electronic fund transfer at point-of-sale terminals.

Where none of the methods mentioned in this rule can be used, the counter used to collect payments should be mechanised or computerised to expedite the collection as well as to improve service to the public.

For the purposes of paragraph (8), receipting machines, intelligent financial terminals or computerised terminals may be used.

Machines to be purchased should, where possible, be of the type which are able to accept electronic fund transfer at point-of-sale transactions.