Payments Lockbox
A lockbox is a service provided by some banks to their business customers who receive a high volume of payments by check. The payments can be sent to an address at the bank, and the bank will deposit the checks in to the customer's account and then send the customer a file detailing all the payments received. Opentaps can then read such a file and create corresponding payments and apply them to your customers' invoices.
IMPORTANT: In most cases, the banks will send the payments in a text file format, and the format may vary slightly from bank to bank.
Lockbox File Format
The lockbox file is a fixed field flat file. The first character of each line describes what kind of data is contained in that line. For our purposes, we can consider the lockbox filed to be divided into several batches, with each batch beginning with a line which starts with a "5" and ending with a line which starts with a "7". Within each batch, each payment is on a line which starts with a "6", and each payment can be allocated to several customer invoices on lines which begin with a "4".
Start of Batch
These are lines starting with a "5" and are mapped to the opentaps LockboxBatch entity. The following fields are relevant:
| Field Name | Start | End | Length | Example Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record type | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 |
| Batch number | 2 | 4 | 3 |
Working with Lockboxes
Go to the Manage Lockbox Batches in Financials to upload your lockbox file. You should then see it in the list of lockbox batches which are available for processing. Click on one of them to go to the Lockbox Batch Details, where you can review the individual payments and their allocations to the invoices. You can change the way the payments are allocated, but you cannot modify the original data from the lockbox file. After all the lockbox payments are properly processed, the lockbox batch will be marked as completed.
