ALIS Pay: Monthly ACH Pulls

This guide outlines a monthly process your team can use to complete ACH pulls in ALIS.

This assumes your community is already live with ALIS Pay and you have an active CardPointe account. If you need to set this up, contact your onboarding manager or the ALIS support team.

For more information about how payers can run their own ACH payments, read this article: How to Collect Payments Through ALIS Connect with ALIS Pay

Verify your invoice and payment schedule

Invoices automatically generate on a specified day each month. This can be adjusted in the Billing Settings for your community. This day should be coordinated to allow enough time to review the invoices for accuracy and make changes as needed before sending them to payers.

Sending invoices to payers can be done using the Invoices page. From here you can email the invoices, or print them and create mailing labels for physical mail delivery. For more information about sending invoices, read this article: How to send invoices and statements to payers.

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 these days of the month when you are updating the Payment Date Preference field on your payer contact pages.

Review payers and add new

Use the Payers report to show your list of residents and their default payers. 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. 

1. To add a new payer contact for a resident, they must first 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.
2. For all payers doing ACH, you can verify that their information includes ACH details and select the day of the month the transaction should run.
   • Use the Options menu to the far right of your payer and select either Edit Contact for payers other than the resident, or Edit Payer Details for residents who are their own payer.
3. This lands us on the Payer Information section of the contact's details page. If you have not already, select the Invoice Preference, set the Payment Preference to ACH, and select the Payment Date Preference. You can also add the payer's address. Click Save.
4. Scroll down to the Monthly Recurring Payment section. Here is where we will add the payer's bank information required for the recurring ACH pull.
   • Click +Add Payment Method and choose Bank Account. Type the required details in the Payment Details pane, including the billing address associated with the payment method. Click Add Payment Method to save.
   • We can Edit, Disable, and Delete any payment methods we add here.
   • Click the button Enable Recurring Payment, and choose the payment method for future recurring payments.

Complete your ACH pull

After invoices have run and have been reviewed, you can submit your ACH pulls in the Payment Center.

1. Start by clicking the button ACH/CC (not the smaller arrow button next to it). This will open a modal for you to select whether you are submitting ACH, credit card, or both types of payments.
   • The Payment Date Preference can be left as All unless you only want to run payments on specified dates. In order to have options in this menu, you must have different Payment Date Preferences specified for individual payers.
   • The "Balance as of:" field will default to the first day of the current month. You should only need to adjust this if you are running payments for mid-month move-in or move-out invoices, or other incidental scenarios.
   • Click Submit to review details for specific payers and payments.
2. If you haven't used the Payment Center before or have questions, read the Payment Center Guide for more details. The amount you add to the payer accounts will be the amount withdrawn ACH. This will default to the payer's outstanding balance, but you can edit this of course!
   • Once you click Submit Payments, the payments are queued to withdraw from the default payers' associated bank accounts. If the withdrawals are successful, the payments are applied to resident invoices.
     
3. You can use the Payment Gateway Txns tab in your Payment Center to see the status of all payment batches you have submitted. To see more details of your ACH payment batches, look at the ALIS Pay Report, found on your Reports page in the Billing section.
4. Your team will be set up with access to CardPointe where 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 Center Guide

How to Set a Resident Payer

How to Collect Payments Through ALIS Connect with ALIS Pay