Automating the ACH or Safe Pay file upload to the bank

GP has many features that are seldom put to use due to various reasons. End users are often hesitant to automate a critical manual almost daily task with what GP has given. While this may be for safety reasons. It is my humble opinion that any daily task that can be automated should be automated. Some tasks are easier to automate and have less impact than the others while being equal in mission criticality.

Take the case of subscribed SSRS reports that deliver powerful actionable data to the controller such as new naturals added over the past 30 days.  This is such a convenient actionable report that would benefit the accountant who is tasked with closing out the month.

So, back to the title of this blog. Do you automate the upload of the file to the bank? Do you do that with your daily ACH? Can you verify in GP the batch total and count of transactions that was sent to the file? Of course you can. Do you have to open this file every day and check the count and total? If yes, then go to the root of the problem and fix it. Accountant's time should be spent on the cause of spend variance rather than manually verifying the total sent by GP to a file. It takes a bit of trust initially. Also, if you are on the supported version of GP, which at the time of this writing should be GP 2015 r2 or higher ( fyi, that version is going to loose support as well fairly soon), Microsoft is contractually obligated to resolve any anomalies reported by the bank or the customer.

The next area that could use automation is the safe pay file. Safe Pay also called Positive Pay in the banking industry is a validation service provided by the bank to its business customers that basically prevents fraudulent cashing of checks. GP gives you a easy way to set the file up. A file should conform to the format specified by the bank. Some banks still insist on a really mainframeish looking format. No need to worry as GP allows you to configure fixed width files that require a header as well as detail and trailer records. Once you set these up, the AP staff member after

Generating EFT file

Prints paper checks and posts these all the way in GP

Generates the Positive pay file from Financial routines > Safe Pay Upload

This usually sends a file to the location specified in the Safepay configurator window. Now if a communication link is specified the file is uploaded right then and there to the bank using the name of the communication console program. In order to automate the last step, I recommend leaving the communication link blank. Instead add a windows schedule task to execute the same program that will go look for the Safe Pay file in the said location and transmit via SFTP to the bank.

By automating in this fashion you ensure accuracy and efficieny in the process.

It is 2019, even in this day and age there are people who are not comfortable giving their account number out to others, so we are going to have paper checks for some time before being sweeped by the next big innovation in fintech.

I hope this didn't bore you and thanks for reading my blog.