ACH Payment method vs personal check

[Reluctant Watchman]

If you had the option of receiving payments via ACH payment (direct bank-to-bank) vs. a check, which would you choose?

I remember reading something recently about ACH payments being weird or conspiratorial...

What is an ACH payment? It stands for Automated Clearing House.

"An ACH payment is an electronic payment made from one bank to another. An employer that uses direct deposit authorizes payments from its bank account to its employees’ bank accounts via the ACH network. You might schedule an ACH payment for your mortgage each month."

[Cruiserdude]

If you had the option of receiving payments via ACH payment (direct bank-to-bank) vs. a check, which would you choose?

I remember reading something recently about ACH payments being weird or conspiratorial...

What is an ACH payment? It stands for Automated Clearing House.

"An ACH payment is an electronic payment made from one bank to another. An employer that uses direct deposit authorizes payments from its bank account to its employees’ bank accounts via the ACH network. You might schedule an ACH payment for your mortgage each month."

This sounds like the kind of question that @Fred would be a good source to answer.

[Reluctant Watchman]

The ACH network is the part where I think things get weird.

[farmerchick]

I was asked to sign a disclosure that allows the person paying me to enter my account and take out funds that they felt they were owed if i chose to get my payment through ach. I declined for several years but when covid hit I just opened another bank account with A 100.00 balance and let them put the money in there. I then take the money out and put into another account so that if they feel so inclined they can take my 100.00. I tried to get out of that part of the agreement for ach but to no avail. This a large corporate client that I have. Other clients pay with checks and I have to wait for them. The convenience is awesome but I hate the language of the agreement and feel I could have my account drained for any reason after a legit payment. I thinks it's weird that it works that way. I never pay anyone with ach....i use checks or wire transfers if needed. I really don't like the new push for ach payments...

[Original_Intent]

I actually know a bit about this as I worked as a software developer for Financial Processing Systems back in the 80s and 90s. this is back when this was all done on mainframes.
Not sure if everybody worked this way, but banks on our system worked like this.
The banks customers accounts were backed up during the night. The next day, all of the transactions were stored, and the customer accounts were actually a shadow record (so they could get their new balance after a deposit, for instance) and then that night the transactions were applied to the REAL account record, and the balance of the real record was compared to the shadow record end of day balance to verify against errors or shenanigans,

We received ACH transmissions by MODEM (lol) and these were for transactions between banks as was indicated above. So all of the previous stuff was just activity within each bank - the ACH stuff was doing things like clearing checks from one bank that were deposits into another bank. i.e if you wrote a check against your Wells Fargo checking account, and the recipient of that check deposited it into their First Security account, the funds were electronically transferred from Wells Fargo to First Security.

iirc, the transfer was a net change - there weren't all the individual checks, it was more like a net change. so if there were 1000 checks from Wells Fargo for a total of $900,000-, and there were 200 checks from First Security for $1 milllion back to Wells Fargo, then the ACH would just transfer $100,000 from First Security to Wells Fargo. (All of the individual deposits and withdrawals were settled from the transaction record and the REAL non-shadow account records. The ACH just moved net changes between banks.

Now this was back in the day and was probably limited to banks due to the transfer being done on slow, dial-up modems. Now it appears they let consumers do things via ACH. Not sure what advantage to them or to you there is.

[Hiker]

These days, even if you use a check, the bank we'll turn around and use the routing numbers and do an ACH.

[Reluctant Watchman]

Thanks for the responses.

[JohnnyL]

ACH is more secure. Cashier's check would be better than either, I think.