A charge named at the fourth step, after twenty-three digits have been typed

1

Four steps to a payment, and the one a price turns up at

A payment at a cashier is four decisions taken in a fixed order. Choose a method. Choose an amount. Supply the instrument. Confirm. Every one of those is a screen, each is reached only from the one before it, and the sequence never runs backwards.

A charge on the payment belongs to the fourth screen. Not to the first, where a method is picked and a scheme mark sits beside it. Not to the second, where a number goes into a field showing no deduction. Not to the third, where an instrument is supplied. It turns up where the total gets assembled, and no later screen exists for it to turn up on while still being disclosed.

The complaint is exactly that and no more, which is narrower than it sounds. The figure is disclosed. A reader who reads the fourth screen knows the charge before any money moves and can stop. Nothing is concealed, nothing is untrue, and a page claiming otherwise would be describing something else.

What this site measures is where a term is settled, and this one is settled at the cashier, at the fourth step of four, by which point three decisions have already been taken and a quantity of typing has been done. Part two counts the typing. The rest of the leaf prices the figure.

Two readings of the arrangement are both available and both correct. A charge named before the money moves is disclosure. A charge named after three screens of commitment is placement. What separates those two readings is the quantity this whole section was built to measure, and on the figures below it comes to £2.50 on a £10.00 payment.

2

What has been typed by the time the figure is named

Count what the third screen asks for. A long number across the front of the instrument, sixteen digits of it. An expiry, four more. A security code, three. That is twenty-three digits entered before the fourth screen draws, alongside a name and usually an address.

Twenty-three is a figure worth having because it measures effort rather than time, and effort is what makes somebody finish a thing they would otherwise abandon. A reader who has typed twenty-three digits has invested something that cannot be recovered by stopping, and the charge is named at precisely the moment that investment is largest.

Run the sequence the other way and the asymmetry is plain. The cashier knows its own charge at step one, because it is the cashier’s charge. The reader learns it at step four. Nothing technical prevents the figure from standing beside the amount field at step two, where it would change a decision rather than confirm one.

Here is the charge this leaf works to, carried as an assumption throughout and labelled as one in every sentence that spends it: £2.50, or three per cent of the payment where that is the larger, taken out of the payment so that the account receives the remainder. No rule this site can cite sets any such figure, and no published tariff for cashier charges was found to put in its place.

Where a cashier adds its charge on top instead of taking it out, every figure below moves by the same amount in the other direction and the shares are computed against a different base. The shape does not change: a flat charge is a large proportion of a small payment and a negligible one of a large payment, whichever side of the total it is written on.

3

A flat charge against a payment, all the way up

Take the assumed charge across a range of payments and the arithmetic does something a single example hides. The charge does not scale. The payment does. So the share taken falls as the payment rises, and it falls fast at the bottom of the range where most qualifying payments sit.

A payment of £10.00 arrives as £7.50, a quarter of it gone. A payment of £50.00 arrives as £47.50, a twentieth gone. The charge is identical in both, and a reader comparing the two as percentages is looking at 25 against 5, while a reader comparing them as sums is looking at £2.50 against £2.50.

Typed into the amount field £10.00 Credited once the fourth screen applies £7.50 The price of a figure that stands nowhere earlier £2.50

Read the fourth column from the top and it collapses from 83.3 to 3.0, then stops falling. Everything interesting happens in the first five rows, which is exactly the band a promotion asking for a small qualifying payment lives in, and nothing interesting happens at all above a hundred pounds.

The four bars shorten by an identical amount and look progressively less damaged, which is the honest visual expression of a flat charge. Nothing about the top bar is worse in pounds than the bottom one. What is worse is everything about it in proportion, and proportion is what decides whether a qualifying payment still qualifies.

4

Three crossings, and what each of them marks

Three payments in that range are worth naming, because each marks a line where the arrangement changes character. All three come out of the assumed charge rather than out of any rule, and all three move if the assumption moves.

The first is £5.00, where the charge and the credit are both £2.50 and exactly half of what leaves a bank account reaches the balance. Below that payment the charge is the larger part of what moves, and at £3.00 it is five times the credit: fifty pence arrives and two pounds fifty does not.

The second is £65.00, and it is the line this leaf finds most useful. At that payment the charge equals the whole expected cost of a single pass across the reels on what is credited: £62.50 of balance hands four hundredths of itself to the reels, which is £2.50 of expected margin and matches the charge to the penny. Under £65.00 a payment loses more at the confirmation screen than it expects to lose on the reels.

The third is £83.33, where three per cent of the payment catches the flat figure and the percentage limb takes over. Above it the share stops falling and settles at a constant three per cent, so the arrangement behaves like two different charges joined at a point most readers will never reach.

£5.00, £65.00 and £83.33, three lines a payment crosses and no screen marks

None of those three figures is printed anywhere a reader can see it, and none of them could be, because each depends on the charge, on the return and on the assumption that a balance is pressed once. What a confirmation screen prints is one row of the table in part three, computed for the payment in hand, and a single row carries no shape at all.

5

One charge set beside the margin it dwarfs

Readers of this site spend most of their attention on the return figure, because the whole subject is built on it. On a small payment that attention is pointed at the wrong number, and the arithmetic proving it takes two lines.

Take the £10.00 payment. What reaches the balance is £7.50. One pass across the reels leaves an expected £7.20, which means the reels are expected to keep £0.30. The charge at the fourth screen was £2.50. One figure is more than eight times the other and only the smaller one was studied.

Eight and a third is the exact ratio, and it arrives twice from calculations sharing no step. Divide the charge by the margin: £2.50 over £0.30 is 8.33. Or convert the charge into staking, since £2.50 is the margin on £62.50 pushed across the reels, and divide that by the £7.50 balance to get 8.33 passes. Two routes, one answer, which is what happens when a fixed sum is being measured against a fixed rate.

Read the last column downwards and it falls through one somewhere between £50.00 and £100.00, crossing at the £65.00 part four named. Above that line the reels cost more than the screen did. Below it the screen cost more than the reels, and on a £5.00 payment the screen cost twenty-five times as much.

None of that makes the return figure unimportant. It makes the return figure the second thing to look at on a small payment and the first thing on a large one, which is a sentence about proportion rather than about which number matters in principle. Twenty-five passes is a long evening. Twenty-five passes is also what one line on a confirmation screen cost.

6

Disclosed is not early, and that distinction is the page

Being exact about the criticism matters here, since a page attacking a disclosed figure for having been disclosed would be worth nothing at all. The charge is stated. It is stated before the money moves. A reader can abandon the payment at that point having lost nothing but the typing.

So the criticism is about one quantity only, which is position, and position is the quantity this whole site measures. The charge is settled at the cashier, on the fourth of four screens. The same figure placed beside the amount field at step two would be settled at the cashier as well, two screens earlier, and would be seen by a reader who has typed no digits at all.

A clause about charges usually does exist further back, sitting in the written terms, reserving a right to pass processing costs on. That clause carries no figure. It cannot be computed with, it does not distinguish £2.50 from £6.00, and a reader who found it would know only that a charge is possible, which they could have assumed.

Set the two against each other and the sorting is clean. The possibility of a charge is written where a reader could find it and is worth nothing arithmetically. The amount of the charge is worth £2.50 on a £10.00 payment and is written where a reader meets it last. Value and position run in opposite directions, which is the pattern this section of the site keeps finding.

The honest summary of the arrangement is therefore short. Nobody is misled, and everybody is told late. On a £10.00 payment being told late costs £2.50 to whoever does not read the fourth screen, and costs nothing at all to whoever does.

7

What else the same screen owes under a British licence

A deposit screen in Great Britain carries obligations beyond stating its own charges, and three of them are worth setting against the four steps in part one, because all three are about what has to be reachable from that screen rather than about what it may charge.

The first is a matter of clicks. The standard on financial limits wants those facilities plainly in view and reachable from the deposit screens themselves or by a link sitting on them, with a direct route from the front page and the fewest pages and clicks a system can manage in between. Counted the way this leaf counts, that is a duty about steps one to four rather than about the money passing through them.

The second is an arithmetic rule for limits that overlap, and the regulator works the example itself. Set a daily ceiling of £10 against a weekly one of £100 and the tightest always wins, which leaves a system allowing ten pounds on any day and seventy across the week instead of a hundred. Carry that into the figures here and a £10.00 daily ceiling meets the assumed charge head on: four payments a week credit £30.00 of the £40.00 that left the bank.

The third counts what has gone in rather than what any single screen shows. A monthly threshold of net deposits triggers the light-touch financial vulnerability checks, and it arrived at £500 on 30 August 2024 before falling to £150 on 28 February 2025. Against the assumed charge, £150 of net deposit is fifteen payments of £10.00, of which £37.50 was charge.

Those three are duties about reachability, about which limit wins and about what gets counted. None of them is a promise about an outcome, and none of them says anything about how large a charge may be, because no British rule this site can cite caps a cashier’s charge at all.

8

A confirmation screen that owes nobody anything

Reel promotions taking a card payment out here hold no Great Britain licence at all, which means the three duties in part seven describe a screen other than the one being read. The way to price the difference is to walk the same four steps with each duty removed and see what is missing at each one.

At step one, nothing requires a route to a spending limit to be visible or close at hand, so the click count that the standard wanted minimised is unbounded. A limit facility that exists three pages away satisfies nobody, because nobody is counting the pages.

At step two, where an amount is typed, no rule decides what happens when two limits overlap. The worked example in part seven exists so that £10 a day and £100 a week cannot quietly become £100 in a day, and without it the interaction between two figures a reader set themselves is whatever a system does.

At step four, where the charge appears, nothing whatever has changed, and the finding is that rather than any omission. No British duty caps the charge or moves it to an earlier screen. What a licence supplies around that screen is reachability and counting, and what it never supplied was a limit on the figure in part three.

One loss falls outside the four steps and is kept here because this page is about an instrument. The monthly threshold that triggers a check counts net deposits across an account, and no such counting happens where no licence requires it, so fifteen payments of £10.00 are fifteen separate events rather than £150.00 of anything. Gamstop Online covers whoever takes part in it, which means the operators licensed in Britain, so anybody who has used that protection is better served by the help block below.

9

Settling the figure before the digits are typed

The procedure reverses the order of the four screens, which is the only thing that needs doing and the hardest thing to remember. Find the charge before choosing the amount, rather than after supplying the instrument.

Step one is the cashier’s own page about payments, which ordinarily exists and ordinarily lists methods against costs. Where it carries a figure, the exercise is over and the arithmetic below can be run. Where it carries only a sentence reserving the right to charge, write down that the figure is settled at the fourth screen and nowhere earlier, which is a result rather than a failure.

Step two is a trial run, and it costs nothing. Take a payment to the confirmation screen, read the total, and abandon it. The charge is stated there by definition, since that is the screen it belongs to, and a reader who has read it once knows it for every payment afterwards.

Step three is the arithmetic, and it is three divisions. Divide the charge by the payment for the share. Divide the charge by four hundredths of the credited balance for the number of passes it equals. Divide the charge by two for the payment below which it is the larger part of what moves. On the figures here those give 25 per cent, 8.33 passes and £5.00.

Step four is the subtraction this site performs on everything. Print what was typed into the amount field, print what reached the balance, and rule off the difference. On a £10.00 payment those readings are £10.00 and £7.50, and the difference is £2.50 for a figure that stands on the last screen of four and on none of the three before it.

Two cautions finish the method. Every charge figure printed here is assumed rather than sourced, and labelled at each place it is spent, and a reader running the method on a real confirmation screen should substitute the figure they find rather than the one here. And the three crossings in part four move when the charge moves, so they are shapes to recompute rather than numbers to remember.