I’m curious how others here use MICR check payments within Epicor.
I remember seeing an update that 10.1 included additional functionality, but didn’t seem more details beyond that… Our AP department would love to go to a system where checks can get printed and envelopes stuffed (or equivalent). I was supposed to hear back from someone at Epicor after Insights, but haven’t heard yet…
In a day and age where people are moving towards paperless transactions, and Electronic Fund Transfers, it seems to me (just stating my opinion) that going toward a more complicated paper envelope check system is the wrong direction.
I would rather push towards getting the AP department into EFT and eliminate all the paper and overhead involved in printing and mailing (not to mention depositing checks).
Back in the day… I have done my share of creating check printout formatting with Micr printing on blank checkstock. It works (with the correct fonts), but creating EFT can be even more secure.
@timshuwy - That’s a good point, and would be a fantastic lunch and learn webinar from Epicor Has anyone gone there? I’m sure most of the Epicor customers have banking relationships with our major vendors (80/20 rule), but we’re still cutting 250 checks weekly. It’d be nice to move that to electronic.
For your US suppliers, you only need a relationship with your bank not one for each supplier. We use Chemical Bank. Epicor does not have an interface but it is a very simple flat file. We made a copy of the Generic Payment file and modified it for our needs. And we’re a SaaS customer, so it’s even easier for On-Prem.
For International, you’ll still use checks or a Interface they accept and your bank will honor (like SEPA in Europe).
Even with Checks, you’ll want to use Positive Pay to reduce your fraud surface. This is an electronic file you send to the bank telling them the check numbers and amounts that you wrote and they match sure those match before cashing checks.
Yup… what @Mark_Wonsil said! My first BIG customer (13 years ago) paid 1000s of invoices electronically per week with one simple text file sent to the bank. At that time, Epicor had not yet created the Positive Pay interface (I had never heard of such a thing)… but we created one for their paper checks (they only printed about 5-10 per week for their venders that were old school).
Its only one bank to interface to, BUT you do need to collect the EFT information from all your suppliers.
@timshuwy brings up a very import point. One of the scams going around is somebody sending a change of bank information. These need to be verified! There was a case locally where a company paid millions of supplier payments to a scammer.
We do a “penny test”. We create an invoice for an amount less than ten cents. We pay it with the bank info sent. They need to tell us how much was deposited before we use that account. We also try to verify with the bank that they indeed have an account there. That is not always possible but public corporations must list their bank associations in their corporate records with the State of incorporation.
Has anyone gone there? I’m sure most of the Epicor customers have banking relationships with our major vendors (80/20 rule), but we’re still cutting 250 checks weekly. It’d be nice to move that to electronic.