AMC Banking for Small Business Features
Card Payments
With Card Payments you can batch your invoices to your AR and email them. Once your customer recieves the invoice in their inbox, they can simply click a link and pay the invoice by Credit Card. You will be notified when your customer receives and opens the email, as well when the invoice is paid. A batch of payments will be received daily and all paid invoices will be settled by AMC Banking AutoMatch process.
- (Coming soon, 2019 Q2)
Positive Pay
With Positive Pay, you can provide details about checks you’ve written and your bank will compare specific details of these checks when presented for payment. Any check that does not match the account number, check number and dollar amount you’ve provided will be marked as an “exception” and will be available for your review. You can then decide whether to proceed with payment or have the check returned. You will be able to export a “positive pay” file directly from your AMC Banking and send it to your bank in the needed format. The file can be uploaded daily with newly written checks. If needed, you can even void checks directly from your AMC Banking.
Check
Even though most people know what a check is and how it works, there are some pros and cons to be aware of. It’s just one a way of transferring funds from one bank account to another. If a check “bounces” before it is accepted or settled by the bank, the receiver will not be aware that those funds are no longer available to them, risking their other business transactions while you risk your business relationship.
- A check payment is very slow compared to ACH or Wires.
- A check can be voided even after the receiver has accepted or deposited it.
- The amount on the check is the amount that will be transferred to the receiver; whereas wire values, particularly international wires, can be changed by one or more bank fees.
- The check gives the sender an additional benefit because of the length of time needed to complete the transfer.
- Some checks are never settled, which is yet another advantage for the sender.
- Check fraud is more common than frauds with ACH and Wires that are more secure.
AMC Banking does handle check payments and you can print them through your ERP system. Get additional security for check payments using Positive Pay.
See also Positive Pay
ACH
ACH payments are overseen by NACHA, (National Automated Clearing House Association), the money transfer association that all banks in America are regulated by for electronic payments. If you are tired of printing checks, slow or delayed processing times, and potential risk of fraud related to printed checks, electronic money transfers are definitely a quick and efficient alternative to antiquated bank instruments like checks.
An ACH payment is made by sending an electronic request to your own bank with specified details of how much, when, and to whom you would like to send money.
Remittance details, such as payee and bank information, is also requied to ensure the funds are transferred to the correct recipient. However, you do not need to send a separate remittance report if the remittance information can be short.
As mentioned, the ACH payment are supported by all US banks and you can, therefore, use this method of payment to pay all your account payables within the States.
ACH payments are supported by AMC Banking.
Wires
- A wire transfer is executed by the Central Bank Wire Transfer System, such as the Federal Reserve FedWire system. The execution is in real time and is one of the fastest ways to transfer funds.
- A FedWire transfer service is typically costlier than the cheaper ACH payment option as the funds are transferred realtime instead of in batches as the ACH payments.
- Your bank will charge you a fee when you are transferring funds as a FedWire transfer.
- The transfers are also “irrevocable” and, therefore, cannot be voided once they are executed. This is because both account holders, payor and payee, are extensively verified prior to executing the payment..
- Wire transfers are secure.
- Checks can bounce a wire transfer cannot. As such, if you need a verifiable, same-day payment that can’t be cancelled, wire transfers should be considered.
- You can make FedWire transfers from AMC Banking.
Bank Rec
Bank Reconciliation is the process of keeping your bank postings synchronized with the bank account statements. This can be a very time consuming and boring process. Many of today’s ERP systems have automated functionalities to handle this task. AMC Banking’s bank reconciliation functionality is simply faster and more detailed, drastically reducing system error, time and use of resources.
In recent years, bank feeds have been supported by some ERP systems as well. Bank feeds are the feature of having each day’s bank account statement automatically imported to your ERP during the night and automatically reconciling the bank account as well. This means the only manual work left to keep your postings in sync with the bank is to handle the “leftover” transactions. After the nightly reconciliation process has been executed, there may be some transactions left that haven’t been reconciled. For example, a charge by the bank would not yet have been posted in the ERP, and therefore, results in a “leftover” transaction.
AMC Banking easily posts these kinds of transaction as they are made available, and as quickly as these tasks are done, the nightly bank statements are fully reconciled.
Regularly occurring challenges encountered during bank reconciliations are:
- Summarizing postings
- Currency and Exchange rate discrepancies
- Bank statement file containing several bank accounts in the same file
- Inability to recognize different transaction because of a lack of information
AMC Banking addresses all these challenges and many more.
Lockbox
Lockbox banking is a service provided by banks to companies for the receipt of payments from customers. The bank goes to the box, retrieves the payments (these are very often checks), processes them and deposits the funds directly into the company’s bank account. Bank have also digitized these payments into so called LockBox files and make these downloadable from within the bank web portal system.
Whether the LockBox files are downloaded by the user or the files are transported automatically to you by (STP, Host2Host, Bank API’s), AMC Banking can read the LockBox files and execute an AutoMatch algorithm. The AutoMatch algorithm (an automated batch job) can read the details of the payments from the files and settle all the AR open transactions. Only transactions that the AutoMatch algorithm are unable to match will be left in a journal for manual review and settlement by the user of AMC Banking. AutoMatch accuracy is approximately 85% making it highly effective and efficient.