Batch Payments, How Are Most People Handling This?

1

I don’t work in accounts payable, so forgive me if I’m asking some dumb questions.

Our company uses the MYOB accounts package and our accounts team really like it because amongst other things it’s quite easy to create batch payment files in.

A batch payment file, as I understand it, is a type of text file containing a list of payments that you want your bank to process.

In MYOB you go through all your bills and select the ones you want to pay and then at the end you can generate and export one of these batch payment files, which in turn you upload to your netbanking app and hey presto the bank runs the file.

Specifically the format we use is a ABA file, but my understanding is CSV files are also accepted by many banks.

Now I haven’t found any obvious way to do this in ERPNext. But it’s occurred to me that this would surely be something that any business with more than one supplier would need to be doing.

So what is everyone else doing? Do I need to create a custom report? Is the feature in there and I just haven’t figured it out? If you’re not using a batch payment file, how the heck is your account payable keeping up with paying your suppliers? What is everyone else doing?

2

You can probably use Payment Order to do this and create a custom report on top of it to generate the CSV bank file format you wish.

3

I suspected this would be the way to do it. Is this the way others are doing it though? It’s always good to hear some real world use cases.

4

I’m not surprised this hasn’t had a response. I get the impression that ERPNext has a lot of features that very few people actually use, because every time I try to use one, I need to fix it.

Did you end up switching over and if so what has your experience been like?

5

Related to batch payments, we have written custom reports/interfaces to generate payment CSV files as different banks have different format requirements.

In cases, where API based bank integration is available, that is another option for straight through processing . So it depends how far you want to automate.

For small businesses, the above may not be needed as well.