Bank Draft Payments

Accounts with debit balances may pay the newspaper via automatic withdrawals from a bank account. The withdrawals are created by this option, Bank Draft Payments, and are essentially the reverse of Direct Deposit: all accounts who owe more than a certain amount (specified at run time) and have bank account information defined for them in Account Setup will have payments exported to an ASCII file, which will be sent to the bank. The accounts will also have a payment created in Circulation for the amount withdrawn. The ASCII file will be in either a standard Canadian banking format—CIBC (see Appendix B for the format) or Bankers Automated Clearing Services format—BACS (see Appendix B for the format).

To create automatic withdrawals:

1. Select Bank Draft Pmts from the Account Payments menu to display the Bank Draft Processing window.

   
2. Click Add and complete the following fields.

   Field	Type	What to enter
   COMPANY	setup	Enter the ID of the company for which to make account withdrawals. The company ID must be valid for the bank entered below.
   BILL SOURCE	setup	Enter the ID of the bill source for which to make account withdrawals (enter “*” to multi-select bill sources).
   BATCH	open (10)	Specify a batch ID for the batch of account payments that will be created by this process.
   DESCRIPTION	open (30)	Enter a short description of this payment batch.
   PAYMENT DATE	date	Enter the date on which the automatic payments should be automatically withdrawn from the carrier’s bank account.
   CUTOFF DATE	date	The cutoff date is used to determine which payments are due at the time of file creation (i.e., so that the entire credit balance is not included). It must be the same as or earlier than the payment date.
   BANK	setup	Enter the bank where the carrier’s payment money will be deposited into the newspaper’s account.
   SHORT DESCRIPTION	open (10)	Enter some descriptive information (such as “Tribune”) for the account’s bank statement.
   BALANCE MINIMUM	decimal (10)	Enter the minimum debit balance that an account must have in order to have an automatic withdrawal. Accounts with credit balances or debit balances for less than this amount will not be included, even if bank information is defined for them.

3. Click OK and then Continue to create a suspended batch of automatic withdrawals. A processing report will list the number of records, the amount exported, and any errors that occurred.

4. The payment batch can now be accepted in Payment Entry. The entry method must be “combined”. Upon accepting this batch, accounts who qualify for automatic withdrawal will be exported to /dti/exchange/cm/secure/paymentMMDDYY-xxx.