While bank account information can be recorded for all participant types, person and prospect person bank account information is maintained as evidence. A number of different types of bank accounts can be recorded for a person or prospect person and multiple instances of each type are also allowed. ‘From’ and ‘To’ dates are used to record the effective period for a bank account. The details of a bank account do not change over time as a bank account is static. This means that while an individual might close a particular account, the details of that account do not change. For this reason, when maintaining bank account information in the system, users must either create new records or correct existing records, and successions are not allowed.
For example, a client might contact the organization to say he has recently changed banks. In this situation, the user would enter a ‘To’ date on the existing bank account record to indicate the date on which the client closed his old account, and would create a new record with a ‘From’ date set to the date on which the client opened his new account.The same client might later contact the organization to say he is not receiving payments to his new bank account. The user would then view the newly recorded bank account, verify that it is incorrect and edit and correct the details.
Bank account records brokered from another case are processed automatically. In order to do this, the system checks the incoming record to determine if the bank account should be treated as a new bank account, modify an existing account or is a duplicate of an account already held. If the bank account is deemed to be a duplicate (where all attributes on the record match an existing bank account record held) no updates are made.
In order to determine whether to add a new record or modify an existing one, the system first checks if there is an existing record that is logically identical. Logically identical means that a number of attributes match the incoming record - in this case this would include 'sort code' and 'account number'. If these attributes match, the system then updates the existing record held with the details on the incoming record (where the incoming record has the latest received date). If none of the attributes match, the system will add this as a new bank account.