ACH Payments

Tania Yannarilli

I'm curious how others are handling grant payments. Specifically, if you use wire transfer. As of now, we send checks but would like to look into how ACH works for others who use BBGM.

Thanks

Kecia Haggins

@Tania Yannarilli
COVID lockdown propelled us into making ACH payments. After the grant is approved, we call (yes call) each grantee to get their bank information. We've created a secure database to save the information. Now, we only call first time grantees. For “legacy” grantees, we send a secure email to the grantee with the 4 digits of the routing and account numbers. We ask that they confirm these are their numbers. We save the confirmation email then arrange the payment. If the numbers change, they usually send us the new numbers.

Our process is clunky, and we are always looking for ways to improve that is within our company's security policy. We've been discouraged from collecting and keeping account numbers in blackbaud grantmaking. It works well enough.

Patricia Forgy

@Tania Yannarilli
We switched from mailed certified checks to ACH payments a few years ago and are very happy as it saves so much time. Grantees complete an ACH/wire agreement and we manually update this information in BBGM. The initial setup was fairly time consuming but the updates are not. We created a custom report that pulls in the name, routing and account numbers that can then be uploaded to the bank to create the ACH batch. This is helpful because we typically have a large amount of payments after a board meeting. Sometimes, we do receive notice of an ACH error where a grantee did not report a new account number but they are easily handled. I understand we will be able to add the banking fields to forms in the new portal, which is great news for us.