ABA File Management

Learn how to electronically bulk pay providers for supports delivered

Maica has the capability to generate a file in the Australian Banking Association (ABA) format. All major Australian financial institutions use this file format to specify payments to be made from one bank account (generally yours) to one or more bank accounts (i.e. Providers).

Once you have your ABA file, uploading it to your business internet banking portal and authorising the payments is a pretty quick and straightforward process. This is defined below.

Please note: If you are looking for an article detailing how Maica allocates Invoice Line Item/Payment Request records to the ABA File, please refer to the page below.

ABA File Generation

Maica ABA Settings Management

Before an ABA File can be generated, you need to first go through a one-time setup for your organisation by completing the ABA File Management tab on the Maica Settings page. You can see this page and the configuration items to complete below.

What is each of the configuration items for?

The following table provides some more detail on each of the configuration items as part of the ABA File Setup.

Configuration Item	Description
BSB	The BSB number of the account that payments will be made from
Account Number	The Account number of the account that payments will be made from
Account Name	The Account Name of the account that payments will be made from
Financial Institution Code	The official 3 letter abbreviation of the financial institution that the bank account that payments will be made from is registered with.
Lodgement Reference	The description of the payment that will appear on the provider’s bank statement, usually the name of your organisation.
Name of User Supplying File	This is the name of your organisation creating the ABA file.
APCA User Id	This is a 6 digit number provided by your bank. If you’re not sure what this number is, you’ll need to contact your bank.

Generating ABA Files

To generate an ABA file, you need to navigate to the required ABA Export record and click on the Generate ABA quick action button.

Before you do this, make sure that you have populated the necessary Bank Account fields on the Provider Account record

Generate ABA Quick Action on the ABA Export record

You then have the option to exclude Providers AND/OR Invoices from the ABA file

Quick Action to exclude specific Providers or Invoices from the ABA File

Based on the above configurations, when you click "Confirm", Maica will automatically generate the ABA file. The file displayed on screen is the ABA file ready to be downloaded and upload to your Internet Banking Provider.

Example ABA File in Salesforce

The ABA File is saved on the ABA Export record against the Files related list with the following naming convention YYYY-MM-DD.txt

ABA File saved as a File record in Salesforce

When you download the ABA File it would look something like the image below.

Sample ABA File generated

Please ensure that you review the ABA File prior to uploading it to your Bank to ensure it includes the correct Payment information. Once it is uploaded and processed by your Bank, the process cannot be reversed.

The generation and submission of the ABA File is the responsibility of the user and Maica carries no liability for incorrect payments to Providers.

Please also ensure you update the ABA Export Status = Processed once you have uploaded the ABA file to your Bank for processing.

❗Updating the ABA Export Record ❗

Once you have reviewed the ABA File, confirmed it includes your desired payments and uploaded it your Bank for processing, there is one important final step to complete the process.

Once the ABA File has been accepted by your Bank, it is essential that you update the ABA Export record in Salesforce and set the Status to Processed.

Updating the ABA Export Status to Processed ensures that Maica knows not to reuse this ABA Export record again, meaning that it is essentially closed and no additional Invoice Line Item/Payment Request records will be added.

Updating the ABA Export record after processing the ABA file with your Bank

How do you upload the ABA File generated to your Internet Banking Provider?

Each Internet Banking Provider has different procedures on how they process ABA payments. Here is a list of links to the big 4 banks on how to upload ABA files to their upload facility.

• ANZ

• CBA

• NAB

• Westpac

• Alternatively, search Google for [Bank Name] ABA File Upload