1. Home
  2. Resources
  3. Financial Services
  4. ACH
  5. FedACH® Exception Resolution Service Quick Reference Guide (QRG)
  6. General Notes

General Notes

Please refer to the exception case types for additional information.

  • The Exception Resolution Service is offered by the Federal Reserve Banks to Participating Banks to handle ACH exception cases. The service may be used by any depository financial institution (DFI) that uses either the clearing or settlement feature of FedACH. It may be used for all of a subscriber’s ACH exceptions (i.e., a full network service regardless of operator). This includes ACH entries that have cleared and settled through FedACH, ACH entries that have been cleared through another operator, and on-us entries that were cleared directly by the DFI. The Requestor bank can initiate an ACH exception case and a Responder Bank can receive, read and respond to that case.
  • Federal Reserve Banks’ action is based on the DFI’s participation in the Exception Resolution Service. Refer to the FedACH Exception Resolution Service Quick Reference Guide (QRG) case types for Federal Reserve Banks’ actions.
  • Exception Resolution Service participant roles are defined as:
    • Full Service Participant
      • Self-Managed: A DFI that has elected to enroll in the Exception Resolution Service as a full service participant can initiate, receive, read and respond to ACH exception cases, download reports of outstanding ACH exception cases and view a 13-month archive of all inbound and outbound ACH exception messages
      • Third-Party/Private Sector Agency: A full service participant may elect to provision an agent to access and manage exception cases on its behalf
    • Partial Service Participant
      • The Federal Reserve Banks automatically enrolled DFIs that were enrolled in FedACH Information Services as of April 8, 2019
      • DFIs with this service role can receive, read and respond to an ACH exception case, download reports of outstanding ACH exception cases and view a 13-month archive of all inbound and outbound ACH exception messages; they cannot initiate an exception case
    • Offline Service Participant
      • A DFI enrolled in FedACH Origination and Receipt may designate the Federal Reserve Banks as an authorized user to access and use the functionality of the application on behalf of the offline participant (the Federal Reserve Banks do not assume any rights or responsibilities of the ODFI or RDFI for these cases)

     

  • ACH exception messages are located in the FedACH Exception Resolution Service application and will remain in the DFI’s Inbox as noted below:
     
    Information about ACH Exception Message Type, Status and Inbox Duration.
    Message Type Status Inbox Duration
    Acknowledgement Message (ACK) New 5 business days
    Acknowledgement Message (ACK) Reviewed 5 business days
    Acknowledgement Message (ACK) Cancelled End of the calendar day
    Cancel Message (CNCL) New 10 business days
    Cancel Message (CNCL) Reviewed End of the Calendar day
    Open Message (OPEN) New 10 business days
    Open Message (OPEN) Reviewed 10 business days
    Open Message (OPEN) Replied 10 business days
    Reply Message (RPLY) New 10 business days
    Reply Message (RPLY) Reviewed 10 business days
    Reply Message (RPLY) Replied 10 business days
    Reply Message (RPLY) Resolved End of the calendar day
    The messages will be viewable in the Archive for the FedACH Exception Resolution Service once they are removed from the Inbox or Outbox.
     
  • ACH Exception Case Status indicates the status of the message. Case statuses are noted below:
    • Cancelled – The message was cancelled
    • New – A new message was received
    • Rejected – A message failed during a file upload and was not sent
    • Replied – The message has been replied to
    • Resolved – The message has been resolved
    • Reviewed – The message has been reviewed
    • Sent – A message was created and sent
    • Unsent – A message has been created and saved but has not been sent
  • ACH Exception messages that are in a Sent status in the Outbox will be moved to Archive in 10 business days
  • ACH Exception messages that are in an Unsent or Rejected status in the Outbox will be deleted after five business days
  • User Case Management options:
    • ACH Exception messages can be assigned to a person or team when they are created so that when a response is received or a case is cancelled, the information can be handled by the assigned user
    • ACH Exception messages received from another institution can be assigned to a user or team so that the current and any future messages related to the case can be handled by the assigned user
    • Users can search for messages that were assigned to them or their team
    • Search criteria can be saved and used as the sign-on default for each individual user
    • Search result columns can be customized and used as the default for each individual user

    Resources on user case management features are available in FedLine Home > Training > FedACH > Exception Resolution System.

Supporting Documentation Guidelines

Depository institutions are able to attach up to nine documents of any supported file type to a single message. All attachment files must be free of malware, prior to uploading the attachment(s) to the exception case. Additionally, attachments must not include any macros, hyperlinks or embedded files or the exception case may be cancelled and resolved back to the Requestor.

The following documentation formats are supported using this service and are attached to the case by the sender of the message.
File Type File Format File Size Limit
Audio MP3 5 MB
Audio WAV 5 MB
Audio WMA 5 MB
Compressed ZIP* 10 MB
Document XLS / XLSX 3 MB
Document PDF 3 MB
Document DOC / DOCX 3 MB
Image JPEG 1 MB
Image PNG 1 MB
Image TIFF 1 MB

* ZIP files can only contain the document types listed above.