Who Uses Issued Checks vs. Who Uses Paid Checks – AFS

Typically, Issued Checks will be created and submitted by Positive Pay Business Clients and Paid Checks will be uploaded by financial institutions. However, any user with the correct roles and permissions can have access to either. We can see user roles by navigating to Settings > Account > Roles/Permissions.

There are three permissions pertaining to Issued Checks: View Issued Checks, Add Issued Checks, and Edit Issued Checks. There are two permissions pertaining to Paid Checks: View Paid Checks and Add Paid Checks. These allow users to upload an Issued or Paid check or file, view already-uploaded Issued or Paid checks, or edit existing Issued checks.

Typically, a business would upload to the PositivePay portal a file of checks or manually enter on a one-by-one basis. When the checks are paid, the paid check information would also be uploaded by the financial institution. The Paid Checks would then be matched to the Issued Checks (using routing number, account number, and check number as the basis for initial matching) and approved for payment or an exception would be found for operator review and resolution. In both instances, exception notifications (text and/or email) can be set up to send to the business so that actions could be made on the checks. Or, if the business has contracted with their financial institution to enable the financial institution to review and resolve exceptions on behalf of the business (a business process operation configuration within PositivePay), notifications may be sent to the financial institution. 

 The valid headers for Issued and Paid Checks file uploads can be found in the Positive Pay portal by navigating to Settings > Settings > File Formats.

This will show the valid file formats for any file available for each user to upload. Issued and Paid Checks can always be created manually as well. This is done by navigating to Issued Checks/Paid Checks > Add Check.