About six months ago the teller at my bank questioned me depositing a check into my personal savings account that was made out to my company ( sole proprietor ), she asked her supervisor and she said, in short, we can’t do that and never did. I told her that i have been doing it for eight years here and my other bank and assured her my other bank would and she said it was against the law. Went to my other bank and cashed into my checking account there.

Two days later I met with the first bank branch president and asked him about their policy and he said it is not a problem and will cash business checks into personal accounts. We then straightened out the tellers and the supervisor aka business accounts manager. She greets me everytime I come into that bank and still have only personal accounts. I hate it when service businesses try to tell us how to run our businesses.

Good luck to All

Yeah I was confronted with the same dilemma as well when I was presented with a business check made payable to my company name. I had deposited my business checks into my personal savings and checking accounts with no problem for some time when my bank (Citibank) suddenly stopped allowing me to do that. So I finally opened up a business checking account and started paying the monthly fees they charge for business accounts. The fee’s only $10 a month, but I don’t like the idea of paying a fee, no matter how small, for a service I barely use.

If you want to avoid the monthly fees that many banks charge for business account privileges, you might want to check out financial institutions like PNC Bank or BB&T Bank. They offer free business checking accounts so long as you don’t deposit or transact more than a certain amount. If your balances are generally low, they are good cost effective solutions to consider. But I don’t think you can simply cash out the check like a normal personal check in your own name. It has something to do with the Patriot Act – designed to combat against money laundering activities by terrorists. Good luck!

A business (or their agent) CAN endorse a check, deposit a check, and withdraw cash from a business account…but a business itself can never, ever, walk into a bank lobby and “cash” a check–only a natural person can. To comply with KYC a bank will usually ask you to prove the business exists, provide a tax ID number, and establish who can conduct transactions on the account. This can be as simple as a DBA sole proprietor relationship (Wendall Jones, d.b.a. Wendall Jones Dog Walking Service–and even using Wendall’s own social security number as the tax ID number.) Or it can be as complicated as a huge corporation with billions in assets. Both have to provide KYC information.

Either way, without this information on file, a bank can NOT “Know Your Customer.” If you don’t have a business account at a bank, they WON’T have this info on file–therefore, they would be in violation of these US codes if they knowingly negotiated a check made payable to a business. Produce the documents, establish a business account, and a bank can negotiate (but not “cash”) a check made payable to a business.

Signed Financial VP

You must be an automated teller ( following your bank rules), It is not against the law!!!!!!! It is a banks option. In the worst case, sign the check over to yourself and cash it in your personal account. Change banks if problem persist, I did.

What about if you sign the check on the back with the business name and sign it over to yourself (Or what ever name is on the personal account) will that make it o.k. for the bank to put the check made out to your small business into your personal account?