Recipients, Companies and Banks (ODFIs) are the fundamental entities within an ACH file. Recipients are individuals or businesses with bank accounts that participate in transactions. Companies create files and, within ACH Pro, they can also act as a recipient to prevent duplication. ODFIs are banks that a company gives ACH files to for processing.

Let’s say you own The Donut House, a fictitious donut shop that processes ACH files through Bank of America. You have several franchisees and employee 100 staff. You send and pull funds from your franchisees each month and send payroll biweekly. In this case, The Donut House would be the company creating files. It’s franchisees, employees and itself (it’s participating in transactions using its own accounts) are recipients. Bank of America would be its ODFI.

Contents:

Recipients/Companies

Recipients and Companies can be managed from their respective pages in ACH Pro. As noted above companies are a special type of recipient, as such the steps to manage both entities are the same.

Create

You can create a recipient/company on their respective page by clicking the new button in the top right corner (for example, + Recipient on the Recipients page).

1. Legal Name is required.
2. Unique ID is optional. It allows you to tie this recipient to external systems or uniquely identify them in an ACH file.
3. Recipient Type is required. Use Consumer for individuals and Business for businesses. The Company type is only available when on the Companies page to prevent confusion.
4. Company ID is required for companies. This field is only visible when creating a company and is typically the tax ID of the company (EIN or SSN).

A recipient can have zero or more accounts (they must have an account to be used in an ACH file).

1. Nickname is optional. This allows you to assign a user-friendly name to accounts. This is most useful for accounts you own.
2. Account Number is required.
3. Account Type is required.