ALIS Pay: Monthly ACH Pulls

ALIS Pay is the fully integrated payment gateway designed to streamline your financial operations. This guide outlines the standard process for collecting monthly ACH payments using the ALIS Pay payment gateway. 

This guide is intended for communities that have already completed the ALIS Pay application and setup process. 

• Contact your Account Manager or the ALIS Customer Success Team to begin the application process, or read ALIS Pay: Payment Gateway Reference Guide for more details. 
• For more information about how payers can run their own ACH payments, read this article: How to pay bills through ALIS Connect.

Step 1 - Preparation before ACH pull date

Completing these steps a few days before you pull payments ensures accuracy and reduces errors.

1. Verify your invoice generation schedule by confirming your community's automatic invoice generation date in Billing Settings. Ensure this date allows sufficient time for your team to review all invoices for accuracy before they are sent to payers. 
2. Determine your ACH payment schedule. It is possible to run ACH payments as many times throughout the month as you need, but most likely you want to plan to run all payments on one or two specific days each month. Use the chosen day(s) of the month when you are updating the Payment Date Preference field on your payer contact pages in Step 3.
3. Audit default payers. Run the Payers Report (found in Reports > Billing) to review the current list of residents and their default payers. This is the best time to identify any residents who may be missing a payer setup (i.e., Payment Date Preference) and to make updates to existing payers. 
   • Note: It is a good practice to look at this in the days leading up to your invoice generation date to verify any changes. If no payer setup has occurred, this will show all residents themselves as their own default payers. 
   • To add a new payer contact for a resident, they must be added as a contact. In the Payer Information section of the contact's page, the payer should be set with the 'Yes - Default' option. For more information about resident payers, read this article: How to set a resident Payer.
4. Ensure payer and recurring payment methods are set up. (Note: If a resident or payer is not appearing when you try to pull payments, it is almost always because their payment method is not set up correctly.)
   • For a payer to be included in an ACH pull, they must be set as a 'Yes - Default' Payer in their contact profile.
   • Have a Bank Account added as a Payment Method.
   • Have the 'Use for Recurring Payments' box checked for that bank account. 
   • When you Manage Recurring Payment, you will also have the option to set a max limit for ACH transactions.
5. Review and send invoices. Once invoices are generated and reviewed for accuracy, send them to payers. You can email invoices directly from the Invoices page or print them for physical mail delivery.

Step 2 - Process the monthly ACH pull

On your scheduled day(s), follow these steps to collect payments from all applicable payers.

1. Navigate to the Payment Center.
2. In the ACH/CC Processing tile, click the +Collect ACH/CC. 
3. Configure your batch in the Collect ALISPay Gateway Payments pane. Fill in the necessary details:  
   • In the Payment Method dropdown menu, select ACH. (You can also select both options if you wish to process credit cards in the same batch).
   • Payment Date Preference can be left as 'None Selected' unless you only want to run payments on specified dates. You can select a specific date (e.g., "1st of month") from this dropdown menu only if you have configured these Payment Date Preferences for individual payers and wish to run separate batches.
   • The 'Balance Due as of' date defaults to the first day of the current month. Review it for accuracy so that any payers with outstanding invoices as of that date will appear in the next page. 
4. Click Next: Review.
5. In the Payment Gateway Bulk Payment page:
   • You will now see a list of all eligible payers who have a valid ACH payment method on file and an outstanding balance. 
   • The Amount field will auto-populate with the payer's total outstanding balance.
   • You can edit the Amount for any payer if you need to pull a partial amount or a different figure. The amount in this field is the exact amount that will be withdrawn. 
   • You can Exclude any residents or payers to not include in the batch if needed.
6. After reviewing all payers and amounts for accuracy, click Submit Payments at the top of the page.
   • The payments are now queued and sent to the processor to be withdrawn from the payers' bank accounts. If the withdrawals are successful, the payments will be applied to resident invoices.

Step 3 - Post-pull ACH auditing

After submitting the payments batch, you can track its status and manage your deposits. 

• Track batch status by reviewing the Payment Gateway Txns tab in the Payment Center. 
• To see more details of your ACH payment batches, look at the ALIS Pay Report, found on in Reports > Billing section.
• You can see the status of your deposits and perform voids and refunds. Read this article for more information about how to complete ACH voids and refunds: ALIS Pay: Voids and Refunds.

Related articles:

• ALIS Pay: Payment Gateway Reference Guide
• Payment Center Guide
• How to Set a resident Payer
• How to pay bills through ALIS Connect

For more assistance with ACH Payments,

Contact our ALIS Customer Success Team:

888.404.ALIS (2547) or support@go-alis.com