Let your customers based in the US easily pay by authorizing you to debit their bank account via Upflow portals. Available for:

What is ACH Direct Debit?

ACH ("Automated Clearing House") is a US payment network overseen by Nacha that enables bank-to-bank payments. It features two main modes for transferring the funds (more details here):

• ACH Credit: your customer instructs their bank to send the money to yours. This is functionally similar to a wire transfer, customers "push" money to you.
• ACH Debit: you instruct your bank to debit the customer's bank account after obtaining their authorization. You "pull" the funds into your own bank account.

Collecting Payments via ACH Direct Debit

First, follow this short guide to make ACH Direct Debit available as a payment method for your customers in a few clicks.

Triggering a direct debit over the ACH network involves 3 main steps:

1. your customer verifies their bank account.
2. your customer authorizes the debit by agreeing to a one-off or recurring mandate.
3. the debit order is issued over the ACH network.

Step 1 - Bank Account Verification

Upflow supports instant verification via bank login. This is the default option presented to your customers, which will allow them to securely sign in to their bank and select the account they want to be debited from.

While nearly all US banks are supported, in rare cases your customer's bank may not have APIs for data sharing or their systems can encounter temporary issues. Upflow provides a fallback option so your customers can manually verify their bank account using their routing & account number (takes 1-2 business days).

Specific to manual verification ⬇️

If your customer chose the manual verification option, our payments infrastructure partner Stripe will issue a small direct deposit (under $1) to their bank account. They will also receive an email link to enter a unique code sent along with this micro-deposit transaction to confirm their account ownership.   Note that this verification process does not block your customer from authorizing the debit through step 2 below, but the debit order will only be triggered in step 3 once verification is done.

Step 2 - Mandate

Once your customer has selected their bank account in Step 1, they are presented with a page summarizing the electronic mandate details:

View if the customer is paying invoices when agreeing to the mandate (one-off or recurring depending if they opted into autopay).	View if the customer is saving their payment method without paying invoices (recurring mandate available for autopay).

Step 3 - Triggering ACH Debit

Bank account verified via bank login

If your customer verified their account via bank login, the ACH Debit is automatically triggered:

• immediately when payment is confirmed in step 2 above.
• or according to the autopay schedule if no invoice is currently overdue.

Bank account verified manually

If instead your customer opted for manual verification via micro-deposits, the ACH Debit will automatically trigger only once the account is verified as per step 1 above.

In the meantime: your customer is made aware that the verification of their bank account is pending. your platform records a "promise to pay" 10 days in the future (maximum duration for account verification) to help you account for that delay. For example, you can choose to temporarily pause the collection for that specific customer. ACH Debits generally take up to 3-4 business days to be confirmed (or fail).