EFT in Dynamics 365 Business Central & Dynamics NAV: 11 lessons learned the hard way!

EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer), or what we frequently refer to as ACH in the US, should be something easy to set up, right? I can tell you from working with it over the last couple of years the answer is “Yes and no.”

My mission in this article is to ensure that you can answer “Yes” to this question when someone asks you. Follow along as I share with you 11 lessons I learned the hard way while working with EFT in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. If you haven’t read my article Tear up those paper checks! Dynamics 365 Business Central makes ACH easy (also here on MSDW) check it out for a few additional tips. If you are using Dynamics NAV, please read on as there are lessons for you as well, depending on your version.

Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start (now I have that “Sound of Music” song repeating in my head.) But seriously, let’s walk through the process so I can share with you what I learned related to setup, payment journals, generating EFT files, and data exchange definitions. I’ve grouped the lessons by general topic area.

For reference, I am using Version: US Business Central 18.3 (Platform 18.0.27224.28780 + Application 18.3.27240.27381) as I write this article.

Working with the Payment Journal

1. Do not leave the Preferred Bank Account on the Vendor Card blank

If you are not current on your BC updates and you manually fill in the Recipient Bank Account on the Payment Journal line, you may get a non-specific error along the lines of “the bank account does not exist.” What bank account? The source of this error may be a blank Preferred Bank Account on the vendor card. Once you assign the preferred bank account on the vendor card, not only is the error resolved, but this account will default to Recipient Bank Account on the payment journal line. I tried to recreate this error for this article and cannot in my current version. I do not know in what version this was fixed, but on Dynamics on Azure it was 18.0 or later.

2. Confirm the assigned Country Export Format is correct

“Record(81) is not compatible with Codeunit.Run….” If you get this error, go to the bank account assigned on the payment journal line and check the Country Export Format. It is most likely set to the wrong country for the Payment Export Format selected for this bank account. In my test case, it was set to “Other” and should have been set to US.

Note that in a recent update, the blank option for this field was eliminated. If you were working in BC prior to the update and the value was unassigned (blank,) the update did not assign a value and it will still be blank. Once you select a value in this field, you cannot revert it back to blank. Regardless, a value in this field is required to use exports.

Before update:

After update, valid options do not include blank:

3. Set the Balancing Account Type and Number correctly

You get the error “The Bank Account does not exist. Identification fields and values: No.=’’.” The Preferred Bank Account is assigned to the vendor on the payment journal line. You have also indicated the Bal. Account Type is “Bank Account” and the Bal. Account No. is selected on the payment journal lines.

To resolve this error, go to General Journal Batches and set the balancing account type to Bank Account and select a bank account as the Bal. Account No. to be used with this batch.