ACH Processing for Private School

Brianne Baird

Hi there!  I am new to a position that previously had been filled by the same individual for the last 30 years. I am also starting to get very involved with Raiser's Edge and need a bit of help. I have found that many systems in place are much more complicated than they probably need to be as this person did not necisiarily use Raiser's Edge or Financial Edge to their fullest potential. Currently, processing ACH payments is about a 6 hour task which involves:

• Running a Query of anyone who has a reference note of "ACH"- I typically have a list of 150-250 people to process ACH for monthly. 
• Comparing that to a "master excel list" that has the account information for everyone who has requested ACH (very long list)- esentially manually going line by line and taking the account information from the master, to the list from the raiser's edge query. This includes adding people, removing people and changing/updating the payment amounts for each constituent. reconsiling these two lists takes upwards of 2.5 hours. 
• Batch entering (my predescessor did this one at a time, but I am thinking there must be a way to upload the excel into Batch) But doing it the way I have been instructed to takes about 2 hours. 
• Entering them into our bank- another hour
• Committed and post the Batch to Financial Edge

Can someone suggest a better way to do this, any resources I could look at to give me ideas of what to do that could streamline the process? Any advice is welcome and helpful. 


Thank you!