It is not unusual on settlement that a sum of money be retained by the purchaser or forwarded afterwards to a third party. In a paper settlement you would view that cheque made out to the third party and obtain an undertaking that it will be paid to the third party after settlement. Sometimes you actually retain an amount as the purchaser pending some work being done. In a recent transaction this was done by disbursing the money back to our trust account after it had been advanced by the bank to our client. The problem was that we could not view which account the disbursement was being made to because it was entered by the vendor. It would be good to be able view that detail. Perhaps if there was an ability for the other party to make the account details available to view online so we can see that the sum is being disbursed back to our trust account. That way we would only be allowed to see the one we were interested in. I appreciate that we could have redone the settlement figures to reduce the price paid but that looked like it was going to be more complicated.
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