ACH Enveloping Overview

A document envelope consists of control information that enables organizations to effectively exchange messages. This information is added in headers and trailers to messages. Document envelopes are specific to the message protocol used. Creating document envelopes is necessary to use ACH with your trading partners.

NACHA requires the use of Standard Entry Class Code (SEC) codes for each transaction processed through the ACH.

Sterling B2B Integrator supports the use of all ACH SEC codes for all ACH inbound and outbound envelopes.

To support all SEC codes, you must define inbound envelopes at two different levels, ACH File Level and ACH Batch/Entry Detail Level. In addition to supporting all SEC codes (including CTX), these two levels provide more functionality than ACH – CTX envelopes provide. Envelopes defined with these options also have additional configuration parameters which are not available for ACH-CTX envelopes.

All new envelopes should be created using the two-level process (ACH File Level and ACH Batch/Entry Detail Level), rather than the one-level envelope process (ACH-CTX). Although the existing one level process is still supported for files containing only ACH-CTX transactions, we recommend you replace existing ACH-CTX envelopes with the ACH File Level and ACH Batch/Entry Detail Level envelopes.