I’ve been wanting to put this request together for a while now!
With a large portion of our vendors and customers in our region moving to ACH payments—driven by concerns over fraud, slow mail times, and other factors—this functionality has become essential for us. Managing ACH payments more efficiently would streamline a significant part of our operations.
Currently, creating NACHA files and sending remittance emails for ACH payments is a cumbersome, all-day process. This enhancement would make the workflow much more seamless, and I’m interested to know if other businesses would also benefit from these improvements.
Enhancement Request:
Add “ACH” as a Bill Payment Method
Enabling ACH as a bill payment option would allow us to handle ACH payments directly within Striven.
The email should include key details like an identifier number, payment amount, and any applicable invoices. This would automate remittance notifications to vendors, providing them with all necessary information without manual intervention.
Bonus Request: Generate an ACH Number
After generating the NACHA file but before saving the bill payment record, we’d like an automatically provided ACH number. This would add an extra layer of tracking and organization.
For the Striven Team:
We’d be interested in expediting this request and are open to discussing potential costs for this enhancement. If possible, could you provide an estimate for implementing this feature?
I’d share in that cost and I would imagine other UBG and Striven members would as well. It’s the future. It seems like every month there is a new story about an office worker that embezzled millions over years by simply writing themselves checks as a vendor. Huge thefts can occur given time and consistency. This would go a long way to preventing that fraud. Our company hasn’t written a check in years. All of our payments and even refunds to customers go out via ACH. The new treasury rules that just went into effect should make this process even easier and accessible to more companies.
We take the additional step of using a Positive Pay service with our banks to create rules and limits for ACH entries and disallow all checks automatically. I didn’t realize until a couple of years ago, that corporate accounts do not have any fraud protection automatically. If someone takes one of your checks and processes an ACH, you have to sue them to get it back. It’s not automatic as if it were a personal account.
It should also be fairly simple, as a NACHA file is nothing but a fancy spreadsheet. Like above, we would need that information, and vendor account/routing information would be needed. Then a custom report and a link to a Google Sheet would create the new NACHA file. It is possible we could create a clumsy workaround with custom fields, but this is standard place in several ERPs now - even Quickbooks - who is known for dragging their feet toward the recent past, much less the future.
A native form or a link for the Vendor to provide their information and authorization within the portal would be nice as well, so we can keep it on file.
We are also seeing some of our Customers moving to ACH Payments which will bypass Striven / Portal all together and require us to enter the payment “After Bank Deposit” further complicating the Deposit & Reconciliation Process. My understanding at this point is that we will continue to send invoices to our Customers and they will handle ACH on their end. However, the payment will not be recorded in Striven until we enter it into Striven after the deposit.
I have asked tried to get customers to use E-Check through the Portal but they are balking (if they are moving to ACH).
We also are using Positive Pay which requires us to manually approve each check / ACH going out. Not a big issue with our volume but I am concerned how the process of receiving payments will work once Customers move to ACH Payment Processing on their end.
We’ve got a system in place for ACH payments, though I don’t think anyone’s cracked the code for a foolproof approach to receiving ACH details automatically.
Here’s what we do for outgoing ACHs: we mandate that any incoming ACH remittance be sent to a shared email inbox. Once the payment shows up in our bank account and goes through reconciliation, we enter the details on our end.
Ideally, it’d be great to have some kind of OCR import feature that could capture these details and await reconciliation automatically. At this point, we handle significantly more outgoing ACHs to vendors than incoming, so this setup would be a solid first step toward streamlined ACH workflows for the future.
