Business Banking Toolbox

ACH Services

These reports can be automatically generated and shared with your business banking customers or internal departments providing earlier information about returns and NOCs related to ACH originated items. The reports provide information contained in the original forward entry along with return/NOC information supplied by the RDFI or ACH operator.

The return and NOC reports:

  • Automatically flow return and NOC ACH reports to your customers or internal departments
  • Provide timely information (possibly hours/days earlier than the current environment)
  • Help customers react quickly to potential return or NOC issues
  • Provide data to internal staff if your originations are internally generated for loan payments or P2P transactions
  • Reduce manual effort for bank staff and provide a professional report for the customer via encrypted email or through availability for upload into your internet banking cash management portal

Ask your relationship manager about FedPayments Reporter Return Item Report and Notification of Change Report, both available at the customer level and also at the ODFI level.

FedPayments Reporter Service Return Item and NOC Reports for customers may present a revenue opportunity depending on whether your institution chooses to charge for provision of such services. Charging a fee is strictly a business decision for your institution.

Professional remittance reports (i.e. addenda data related to incoming items) help your business customers solve the challenge of matching ACH payments to open accounts receivable entries, invoices or recipients.

  • Reports are in an easy – to – understand, human – readable format and are sent directly to customers early in the morning via encrypted email or through availability for upload to your internet banking cash management portal
  • Customers can use the ACH addenda information to quickly match payments to open accounts receivable entries
  • Reports help your customers gain efficiencies in their internal systems and processes
  • Reports provide proactive and timely information to customers
  • The summary report format shows the most often needed EDI information; The detail report format includes all EDI addenda data included with the payment
  • Reports can be generated to meet unique customer needs:
    • Social Security Beneficiary Report
    • All Received Entries Detail Report
    • A remittance advice report of addenda (EDI) provided in their outgoing originator files can serve as an audit trail for originators

Ask your relationship manager about FedPayments Reporter Remittance Advice Summary Report and Remittance Advice Detail Report available for both receivers and originators, Social Security Beneficiary Report and the ACH Received Entries Detail Report (daily, weekly, monthly).

  • View sample reports (PDF):
    • Remittance Advice Summary Report (available for receiver and originator)
    • Remittance Advice Detail Report (available for receiver and originator)
    • Originators’ addenda records as reported in Remittance Advice Reports generated at an originator level
    • Social Security Beneficiary Report
    • Received Entries Detail Report

The various FedPayments Reporter Service EDI data reports for customers may present a revenue opportunity depending on whether your institution chooses to charge for provision of such services. Charging a fee is strictly a business decision for your institution.

This service gives you the ability to:

  • Proactively share ACH payment data with various staff at your customers’ location
    • customers receive an encrypted email first thing in the morning with an attached PDF copy of all entries matching their desired criteria
    • direct the communication to the person who needs it
  • Provide timely notification of desired information on
    • transactions bearing greater risk such as large dollar debits
    • debits or credits greater than a particular dollar amount
    • payment from a specific vendor
    • all transactions for the day
  • Be proactive — reduce calls to your customer support area
  • Provide a basic positive pay option to help you stay competitive

Customize alerts by business and individual needs:

  • More than 25 criteria combinations provide a variety of solutions for your customers
  • For example:
    • The CFO and the accounting department want to know of debit and credit entries greater than $10,000 (customized dollar value) so they can manage the company’s cash position more effectively
    • The bookkeeper wants a list of all debit entries to match to a positive pay listing.
    • The Owner/President wants to know when a monthly grant payment from a particular program is received (customized by ODFI and Company name)
    • The warehouse manager wants to hold goods until he knows the payment has been confirmed (customized by ODFI and Company name)
    • The Accounts Receivable unit realizes its return timeframe for CCD and CTX entries is limited. A listing of these critical items would help the unit prioritize and meet the deadlines.

Ask your relationship manager about FedACH Risk® RDFI Alert at the item level.

The FedACH Risk RDFI Alert item-level alerts for customers may present a revenue opportunity depending on whether your institution chooses to charge for provision of such services. Charging a fee is strictly a business decision for your institution.

With implementation of Same Day ACH, you can be better prepared to handle contingency situations and offer enhanced services to your customers.

If you submit a customer’s file that meets Same Day ACH qualifications and deadlines, the items will be presented to the receiving institution and settled on the same day. Discuss the possibilities with your operations staff to ensure that you have pricing and customer agreements properly in place.

Some ways to take advantage of Same Day ACH:

  • As a contingency for those times when you receive a frantic phone call from your customer on Friday morning saying they forgot to send their payroll file
  • As a contingency if your area has a weather-related issue such as snow, ice, hurricane, flooding or a power outage that delays receiving your customer’s ACH file
  • As the basis for new product options to help your customers streamline their processes
    • B2B, P2P payments
    • Pay hourly staff via ACH rather than a separate process of cutting checks
    • Bill payments, e-commerce
    • Prenotifications, notifications of change, zero-dollar remittance transactions

It may be wise to discuss the possibilities with your operations staff to ensure you have processing, pricing and customer agreements properly in place.

Ask your relationship manager about Same Day ACH Related Products.

Offering customers a Same Day ACH settlement option may present a revenue opportunity depending on whether your institution chooses to charge for provision of such services. Charging a fee is strictly a business decision for your institution.

Proactively provide your customers with workable information about all of their incoming ACH transactions.

The report lets you:

  • Flow data direct to your customers via encrypted email or through your internet banking cash management portal
  • Provide daily, weekly and/or monthly listing of key information
  • Provide all ACH payment-related information in an easy-to-understand format
    • Offer a variety of formats available; Excel (XLSX), CSV, PDF, TXT, HTML
    • Limit reporting to specific entries: SEC codes, number of entries, forward, return, NOC, Same Day settlement
  • Provide a daily ACH clearing report giving your customer a quick review of incoming ACH items
  • Offer a basic form of positive pay to help you stay competitive
  • Gain assistance from your customer in identifying fraudulent transactions
  • More easily reconcile account receivables
  • Analyze payment streams by vendor
  • View trending and use data to inform cash flows
  • Search, sort, sum and count by available fields

Ask your relationship manager about FedPayments Reporter ACH Received Entries Detail Report (daily, weekly, monthly).

The FedPayments Reporter Service ACH Received Entries Detail Report (daily, weekly, monthly) may present a revenue opportunity depending on whether your institution chooses to charge for provision of such services. Charging a fee is strictly a business decision for your institution.

Can there be too many layers of risk monitoring when it comes to the safety of your institution and your customers? With ACH origination risk monitoring, you can:

  • Set and monitor origination caps for a select group of Company IDs or for an inclusive list of all of your originators
  • Set cap accumulations across multiple processing days
  • Receive email alerts when caps are breached and batches are pended and make the decision to release or reject the pended batch
  • Help recognize risk:
  • Choose and set thresholds to be alerted to a variety of possible situations, such as those below, in advance of the file being processed
    • a breached cap
    • a duplicate file
    • a large keying error
    • an internal mistake
  • Employ a team effort:
  • Work closely with operational staff to protect your institution and customers
  • Know when a customer (or internal staff) originates batches greater than a designated threshold
  • Know more about your customer:
  • Review historical reports of customer performance and/or changes in performance
  • Maintain knowledge of origination patterns to help address safety and soundness requirements

Ask your relationship manager about the FedACH Risk Origination Monitoring Service.

Recognizing risk is heavily tied to being proactive. Customer service is enhanced when you can call the customer with the solution before they call you with the problem.

Through the use of Risk RDFI Alerts, your institution can:

  • Proactively manage known risks, take action, and provide advance communication to your customers and/or internal staff
  • Receive notice of unusual conditions within your incoming ACH batches and/or files and/or with your commercial customer’s account, conditions such as
    • activity on a closed account or batches containing unusually large numbers of transactions and addenda - that could indicate potential fraud attempts such as phishing for valid account numbers
    • Significant origination errors such as large debit amounts
  • Act earlier on potential issues to minimize their effect on your institution since notifications of threshold breaches may arrive throughout the day and prior to the posting of the items
  • Be notified of same day transactions

Ask your relationship manager about FedACH Risk RDFI Alert at the Batch Level.

As the Business Banking unit, you are tasked with knowing your customers, but do you have the tools to monitor them on an ongoing basis and determine, for example, if there are changes in their behavior?

Consider using the Return Ratio, Return Reason Report, SEC Code, ACH Received Entries Detail or ACH Originated Batch and Originated Detail reports as additional tools in helping you know your customers.

The Return Ratio Report

The Return Ratio Report goes beyond showing your originator’s return percentages relative to the NACHA thresholds. It also shows you valuable information about your customers’ origination data; e.g. their volume, item count, SEC codes used.

Review of the reports or aggregated spreadsheet helps you confirm the performance of your customers:

  • Is the volume at the level you expected?
  • Is the monthly dollar amount reasonable?
  • Have the dollar amounts changed, potentially indicating increased risk?
  • Is there a cyclical change in dollars or volume?
  • If the customer has a high level of returns, do you know why the level is high?
  • Are the SEC codes what you expected, or are there new codes such as WEB, TEL, or CIE transactions, which might indicate a change in the company’s process or more risk?
  • Do you have an easy means of looking at trends?

The SEC Code Report

Available at both the financial institution level and the customer level, this report “slices and dices” the information to show originated, received, and return totals.

Use the SEC Code Report to:

  • Compare ACH transactions by SEC code to those approved
    • Are any customer(s) initiating entries outside of those that they are approved for?
  • Review transaction data at the customer level to help you “know your customer”
  • Provide a monthly recap of ACH transactions to your customer
  • Send reports via encrypted email directly to customers or upload them through your internet banking cash management portal

ACH Received Entries Detail Report (daily, weekly, monthly)

Provides detail on payments flowing into your customers’ accounts to help strengthen your knowledge of your customers. Additionally, gain insight into other entities they work with to potentially open a door to advance opportunities within your organization.

Use the ACH clearing report to:

  • Provide daily, weekly and/or monthly listing of key information
  • Analyze payment streams by vendor
  • View trending and help inform cash flow projections
  • Search, sort, sum and count by available fields
  • Choose from a variety of formats (.XLSX, .CSV, .PDF, .TXT, .HTML)

ACH Originated Batch/Entries Detail Reports

Proactively provide your customers with workable information about all of their originated ACH transactions. The report may be scheduled daily or monthly, or run on-demand and is useful for not only analyzing Same Day ACH origination, but all forward and returns originated batches as well. The report includes the following information:

  • Dates (processed, received, effective entry)
  • Received Time
  • Same Day Settlement Indicator
  • NACHA Same Day fee counts
  • Originator Name and ID
  • File ID Modifier
  • Forward / Return Indicator
  • SEC Code
  • Batch Number
  • Entry counts
  • Dollar Amounts

Return Reason Report

This report provides summary level information of return reason codes by Originator for returned entries processed via FedACH® Services.

This report:

  • Provides summary-level information for returned entries processed via FedACH® Services
  • Can be scheduled to be automatically generated on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and can also be generated on-demand
  • Can be set up at the ABA level to show all originators with return activity or set up to limit the information to a specified originator
  • Is available in spreadsheet formats (XLSX, CSV), which facilitate searching by return reason, and in human-readable formats (PDF, TXT, HTML)
  • Provides a custom configuration option that aligns with NACHA’s Unauthorized Entry Fee Rule by showing returns that incur the associated Unauthorized Entry Fee

Learn more about the FedPayments Reporter Service

Ask your relationship manager about FedPayments Reporter Return Ratio, Return Reason Report, ACH Volume Summary by SEC Code, ACH Received Entries Detail Report (daily, weekly, monthly) and ACH Originated Batch/Entries Reports.

  • View sample reports (PDF):
    • FedPayments Reporter Return Ratio Report
    • FedPayments Reporter ACH Volume Summary by SEC Code Report
    • FedPayments Reporter ACH Received Entries Detail Report (daily, weekly, monthly)
    • FedPayments Reporter ACH Originated Batch Report
    • FedPayments Reporter ACH Originated Entries Report
    • FedPayments Reporter Return Reason Report