ACH Payment Overview

ACH processing is different from Credit Card processing. Credit Card processing is sent directly to your gateway. Immediate credit card transactions can be approved or declined right away. ACH transactions work differently. They can take days to approve/clear and will be processed differently by different banks. To allow for this difference, the ACH information (banking information) is collected on the portal and made available to you, but is not sent to your bank. You agency must process the ACH payments through your standard ACH processing (likely your collection system). 

How to know when payments are made? 

• Email alerts are available to notify you when a payment is made online. This will be sent the moment the payment is taken. This is useful if your team wants to manually enter the payment info as soon as it is available. You may add as many email addresses as you want to this notification. The notification list can be found in the settings screen under Payment Email List and Internal Payment Email List.
  
• When you receive the email simply pull up the payment information and copy it into your collections system as if the consumer supplied the information over the phone. 

How to find the account information for an ACH payment?

To find the information (routing number and account number) for a single ACH payment follow these steps:

1. Log into the TakeWebPayments Admin site
2. Go to the Payments tab
3. By default you will see payments made on the current date. If you are looking for another date, use the date search options.
4. Click on the View link in the left-hand column next to a payment
   
5. All the details for the ACH banking routing and account information are listed on this screen
   

Post dates

If you are accepting recurring ACH payments or multi-part settlements using ACH, remember to enter all of the payments/postdates that are created. Each payment in the series will appear on its own line with its own amount and date.

Setting up Automation

Entering each payment as it comes is a simple way to get started, but can be tedious. TakeWebPayments has options available for you to automated the importing of payments into your system using standard CSV files. CSV files are generated each night which contain all information for the previous day's activity. These files can be downloaded manually or using an SFTP account.

To download the nightly payment file:

1. Log into the TakeWebPayments Admin site.
2. Go to the Reports tab.
3. Click on the Daily Summary Reports.
4. Enter in a specific date.
5. Click on the Payments.csv link.
6. A .csv file will be downloaded containing the payment details. For a list of all fields in each file see this article: https://support.concepts2code.com/support/solutions/articles/44002153999-reports-standard-reports-daily-summary-reports

7. Utilize the details for the ACH banking routing and account information are listed so you can process the payment for ACH as you normally would.
   
   

To download the files using SFTP:

• Use the SFTP credentials provided to your agency (or contact us if you don't know them), and use any SFTP client or automated process to download the nightly files. All files are named with a prefix of the date so that you can automate the downlead process to pick up only the current day.