ACH Payments in Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Today I wanted to jump back a little into bank reconciliations, more like how to interact with the bank and in particular ACH. Now ACH is sort of specific to the US although we do have, we can definitely send payments in other countries, but in the US is called ACH. I’m gonna go over that.

In NAV 2018 we do have a little bit of a change there, so if we actually go into the payment journal. So in the Cronus database, we do have two payment journals, one is Bank and the other one is Bank Conv. So these batch right here is intended to send information to the bank automatically, where's the other one is not. You can see here, that there is the allow payment export which works by default checked it wasn't checked on this one.

Banks in Demo
If you actually go and take a look at the banks in the demo database and I’m kind of leading you on here because there is a little bit of a setup, and the setup can be very confusing, if you look at Cronus, you can get an idea of how to work this, you can see that the transfers bank account right here is the one that is intended to be used for transferring stuff.

Now, this is all set up with European setups, so we are not interested in that. What I did is I went into the operating account and actually set up the us version. So if I go into the bank account itself, I can see here that we have something called country export and format and I can pick the US, we can actually pick, Canada, Mexico and the US, it's specifically for North America.

Also in here, we have to set up the swift codes, we got to set up the file that gets stored, and the E pay file creation number. Also, you have to specify the ament export format, so here I’m using EFT default US, but there are other formats available. Now, this is where it gets interesting, these formats there is a lot of them, some might be standard for the bank you are working with, some might not be. So I think this covers mostly the ACH, HTS sort of standardized in the US. The bank actually communication across the world is not standard, I think European union but SEPA and other than that you have all kinds of stuff.

Create a new transaction
We set this up here, and If I go into payment journals, and I did actually work with the normal bank payments. I go in here and I'm just gonna create a new transaction. You can see I’m creating a few of them, so this is just to this vendor, now I need to specify the recipient bank account, so that is set up on the vendor card, and if I go into that one just to give you an idea.

This is the Tomson Bank, this is where we are sending the information, here we need to say that this is used for electronic payments, that’s important. I believe you probably have to set up the zip code, all of that for the field to be proper but I didn't do that, I just wanted to get a file out. But I would definitely go ahead and find those and put them there.

I go ahead and send here 5,000. I have to specify its bank payment type, electronic and then I have these two things up here, exported to payment file and check printed. So if I actually go here and say export, I can pick a bank account number which is gonna be operating one and I’m actually gonna save this to PDF and say ok.

Generate EFT file
Now, I actually exported and you can see the check printed and exported filled out. What happened?, if I actually go into my temp, I have a remittance advice, if I look at that I get this thing that I can print out to say that I paid it, but I don't have the file to send to the bank, so let me take a look at that, how do I get that file?

So if I go into generated EFT files, I get this, this is telling me all of the stuff that I’m gonna be sending into the file and I can then go ahead and mark which ones I want to include, which ones I don't want to include. Know just one, so do that, and say generate EFT file, again I have to pick where I’m gonna put this. I pick temp. Now it transfers and if I look into my directory. I have ACH operating count 6. Take a look at this one, this is the ACH file. This file I could actually send to the bank or upload to the bank.

And this would generate the payment in the bank, so the bank can send it out. So this is the actual ACH file and you can see this is something that you can really create by hand, it's quite complicated. This is the path of actually getting an ACH file out of NAV, so hope you got something out of that if you are confused or stuck on ACH.