The Bank Fee Audit: What Your Treasury Statement Isn't Telling You

Every business checks its bank balance. Almost nobody reads the account analysis statement, the separate document where a commercial bank details what it charged for deposits, wires, ACH batches, lockbox services and a hundred other line items. Banks know this. The analysis statement is dense, jargon-heavy, and mailed (or buried in a portal) precisely because the fees inside it survive on inattention.

For a company moving real money, depository and treasury fees commonly run $500 to $5,000 a month. Audited properly, a quarter to a half of that is typically recoverable, through waivers, repricing, earnings-credit corrections and the removal of services nobody uses.

Read the earnings credit rate first

Commercial accounts earn an earnings credit on balances, which offsets fees. The earnings credit rate (ECR) is the lever banks move silently: when rates rise, your ECR should rise with them, and often does not. A balance of $500,000 at an ECR lagging the market by 150 basis points is $7,500 a year of fee offset you earned and did not receive.

The per-item lines worth checking

Two patterns recur. First, per-item prices set years ago never fall as your volume grows, even though volume is exactly what should earn a better tier. Second, services stack: positive pay on accounts that no longer issue checks, lockbox on a receivables flow that went electronic, reporting modules nobody logs into. Every line should map to something your team actually uses this quarter.

The fees that vanish when questioned

Analysis statements carry their own junk-fee family: statement fees, "relationship" fees, paper-delivery fees, minimum-balance penalties on accounts the bank told you to open. Like their card-processing cousins, they are small, official-sounding and rarely defended when named on a call. Banks have wide discretionary waiver authority, and relationship managers spend it on the customers who ask.

How to run the audit

1. Collect 12 months of analysis statements for every account. Twelve months catches annual fees and seasonal volume.
2. Build the line-item inventory: every distinct service code, its unit price, its monthly volume. This is tedious by hand, and it is exactly the extraction work AIME automates.
3. Kill the unused services. Anything with zero volume for three months is a cancellation, not a negotiation.
4. Reprice the big movers. Rank lines by annual cost; the top five usually carry 80 percent of the spend. Bring competitive per-item pricing for those five.
5. Fix the ECR. This is frequently the largest single recovery and the one banks least want to discuss.
6. Verify for two cycles. Waivers and repricing have a way of partially applying. The statement is the only truth.

Why this drifts even after you fix it

Bank pricing drifts for the same reason every vendor's pricing drifts: repricing events are announced in fine print, unit prices ratchet up but never down, and the customer's attention is finite. A fee audit is a snapshot; the durable savings come from monitoring the statements as they arrive, which is the continuous half of what AIME does. The general pattern is worth understanding on its own: read Vendor Fee Creep: Why Your Contracted Rates Quietly Rise.

Frequently asked questions

My bank waives everything because I keep big balances. Am I fine?

Check what those balances earn. A full fee waiver funded by an ECR far below market can cost more than the fees it waives. Run both numbers.

Is it worth auditing if we only pay a few hundred a month?

An hour of reading for a few thousand a year of recurring savings is among the best hourly rates in finance. And small statements are where unused-service stacking hides best.

Can AIME read bank analysis statements?

Yes. Depository and treasury fees are one of AIME's core categories, alongside card processing, freight and software licensing. Same model: pay only when it recovers savings.