Positive Pay Overview

Positive Pay is a service used to deter check fraud. With Positive Pay, your company electronically transmits a list of issued, authorized checks to your bank in a Positive Pay file created in eFinancials. When checks are presented for payment, your bank compares them to the list of transmitted checks and only pays authorized checks. Checks that do not have an exact match on file become exception items. The bank typically sends a fax or image of an exception item to your company, which examines the check and then instructs the bank to pay or return the check.

Because the file formats are set by banks and differ from bank to bank, eFinancials provides default Positive Pay formats as well as a Positive Pay setup form so you can create or edit Positive Pay file formats. To match the requirements of your bank, eFinancials allows you to pick from a selection of fields, the order of the fields, whether the format is comma delimited or fixed length, and if fixed length, specify the field length.

Positive Pay indicators on the Payment Inquiry Detail tab show the Date/Time/User ID associated with generating or voiding of a Positive Pay file. Note that the Copy Database process does not copy Positive Pay formats to the target database.

Note

Voided checks included in a Positive Pay file show the date the check was voided rather than the payment date.