Save me from the ACH avalanche
August 17, 2022 2:35 PM Subscribe
Calling all finance gurus on MeFi! I'm looking for a company or service that can take a csv file of ACH withdrawals and run the individual transactions. The piece I'm not finding is that all the services I've found will run them, but will deposit one lump sum into our bank account, which then can't be matched to the individual invoices that are being paid. I need the transactions to show up individually on the bank statement to comply with GAAP and not irritate our auditors. Hope me? (details inside)
About 90 of my company's clients pay their invoices via an ACH pull, and we pay about 10 vendors via ACH: each month I set up all these individual transactions through our bank's website. We are about to onboard another 50-70 clients and 15 vendors. I do have templates set up so all I have to do is enter the payment amount and memo info, but the process is still very time-consuming with all the click-throughs and selections. And because the bank's website won't allow me to copy/paste the amounts (why??), typos are inevitable which take time to catch and correct.
Our bank keeps hinting that they are working on offering a batch upload service that runs individual transactions, but it's been two years and it's still not available. None of their existing APIs allow this either, and our dev team does not have the bandwidth to create one right now.
I've talked with a few third-party fintech companies including Telecheck/FiServ, and none of them seem to offer this service. Surely we're not the only company that needs to tie individual bank deposits to invoices. All (GAAP compliant) suggestions are welcome!
About 90 of my company's clients pay their invoices via an ACH pull, and we pay about 10 vendors via ACH: each month I set up all these individual transactions through our bank's website. We are about to onboard another 50-70 clients and 15 vendors. I do have templates set up so all I have to do is enter the payment amount and memo info, but the process is still very time-consuming with all the click-throughs and selections. And because the bank's website won't allow me to copy/paste the amounts (why??), typos are inevitable which take time to catch and correct.
Our bank keeps hinting that they are working on offering a batch upload service that runs individual transactions, but it's been two years and it's still not available. None of their existing APIs allow this either, and our dev team does not have the bandwidth to create one right now.
I've talked with a few third-party fintech companies including Telecheck/FiServ, and none of them seem to offer this service. Surely we're not the only company that needs to tie individual bank deposits to invoices. All (GAAP compliant) suggestions are welcome!
The company I work for employs a bookkeeper for this (and the admin assistant helps with the data entry).
posted by cakelite at 5:26 PM on August 17, 2022
posted by cakelite at 5:26 PM on August 17, 2022
Best answer: Can you speak with your auditors about including the account at the ACH payment processor in the audit?
There's no particular reason you can't check off the transactions on the statement from the processor against the invoices. Sounds like your auditors are being weird about something that is totally normal practice.
This works the same as any other kind of secondary account you might have (like a corporate credit card, for instance, where you account for the individual transactions on the statement but pay them in one lump sum from your bank account).
posted by ssg at 5:38 PM on August 17, 2022 [5 favorites]
There's no particular reason you can't check off the transactions on the statement from the processor against the invoices. Sounds like your auditors are being weird about something that is totally normal practice.
This works the same as any other kind of secondary account you might have (like a corporate credit card, for instance, where you account for the individual transactions on the statement but pay them in one lump sum from your bank account).
posted by ssg at 5:38 PM on August 17, 2022 [5 favorites]
Forgive me if I'm naive, but if you used a payment processor like Stripe, which processes transactions individually but stores a balance which it pays out to you in bulk on a regular basis, then could you show your auditors the Stripe report in addition to your bank statement to correlate individual transactions? Because Stripe can definitely process ACH transactions and report on them individually, and it can also do automated invoicing etc. for you which might be nice.
(the other big advantage of using a third-party payment processor for ACH transactions rather than your bank is that you no longer have to do the work of storing your customers' ACH details securely. For credit cards this is actually a compliance issue due to PCI, I am not sure if this is true for ACH but you should still be scared of having like "customer_bank_accounts.xlsx" or whatever sitting on your computer if that's your current situation.)
(in other words: what ssg said!)
posted by goingonit at 7:00 PM on August 17, 2022
(the other big advantage of using a third-party payment processor for ACH transactions rather than your bank is that you no longer have to do the work of storing your customers' ACH details securely. For credit cards this is actually a compliance issue due to PCI, I am not sure if this is true for ACH but you should still be scared of having like "customer_bank_accounts.xlsx" or whatever sitting on your computer if that's your current situation.)
(in other words: what ssg said!)
posted by goingonit at 7:00 PM on August 17, 2022
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 2:44 PM on August 17, 2022