As a consultant I have seen numerous organizations conduct business with banks that do not conform to the ACH CCD Cash Concentration/ Disbursement File format. Most recently I was at an organization that sends electronic funds transfer (EFT) files to a Canadian bank that required a proprietary file format for incoming EFT files. To conform to the bank’s requirements, the organization had customized the NACHA Payment Format program in 11i.
In R12, Oracle introduced the Payments module which replaces the payments functionality within Payables. The Payments module utilizes BI Publisher templates instead of Oracle Reports to generate formatted EFT files. As a result, you have to re-implement the customizations that were made to the NACHA Payment Format program in earlier releases.
The organization was frustrated to hear that they would need to re-implement the customizations they made in 11i to accommodate their bank’s proprietary file format, since they had invested a significant amount of time and money to modifying the NACHA Payment Format program which was written in Oracle Reports. Their frustration was short lived once they saw how easy it was to create and/or modify eText templates using BI Publisher. They were able to develop the new eText template in the required format using BI Publisher in one day compared to the 7-10 days it had taken them to modify the APXNACHA.rdf report in 11i.
In R12, Oracle comes standard with several different EFT file formats including the following:
- US NACHA CCD Format
- US NACHA CCDP Format
- US NACHA PPDP Format
- US CCDP Consolidated Format
- US PPDP Consolidated Format
- US NACHA Generic Format
With very little guidance, the Oracle developer from this organization was able to download the template from the Payments Setup Administrator and begin working with an XML file that the organization generated from the Payments module by running a payment batch for electronic payments. The developer chose to start with the US NACHA CCD Format because it most closely matched the proprietary format of the bank. Within a couple of hours the developer was reviewing and validating an actual EFT file using the template viewer within the Oracle BI Publisher Desktop application. He was able to modify the file and immediately review the results all from his own desktop using the XML file that was downloaded. By the end of the day he was able to upload the new template to Oracle via the Payments Setup Administrator. The next day the organization was able to generate test files to send to the bank for validation.
So, the bad news is that your NACHA templates from 11i will need to be rebuilt when upgrading to R12, but the implementation has become much easier by using BI Publisher. If you’re lucky, one of the numerous out of the box templates will satisfy your banks requirements and you won’t need to modify anything.
Stay tuned for additional posts on how to modify the ‘Oracle Payments Funds Disbursement Payment Instruction Extract 1.0’ data definition if your bank requires data fields not in the XML output.
