Check Positive Pay
Designed to help businesses mitigate against fraud, Check Positive Pay is managed by your business and verifies the checks you have written and pays only those you have authorized.
Here’s how it works:
- Hills Bank Online users input check information into online banking manually or by generating a check file from your accounting software.
- As checks are presented for payment, they are verified against the check information that was uploaded through online banking.
- If discrepancies are found, the check is flagged as an exception item and an electronic notification is generated early the following business day.
- Users are prompted to log into online banking and decide to "pay" or "return" the transaction before the 11am deadline.
Why should my business use Check Positive Pay?
Positive Pay is a way to mitigate fraud. Below are examples of fraud cases that have occurred to businesses.
- A business was burglarized. It appeared that the supply of blank checks had not been touched; however, the middle section of checks had been stolen. If Check Positive Pay was in place, this service would have caught the first stolen check that was presented for payment.
- A business mailed bills from their home mailbox. The bills were stolen from the mailbox. The ink on the checks was bleached out, rewritten to individuals for larger dollar amounts and presented at the teller windows as payroll checks. If Check Positive Pay had been in place, the service would have alerted the teller that the checks were stolen and they would not have been cashed.
Contact a Treasury Management Representative at 1-800-445-5725 (1-800-HILLSBK) for more information on Check Positive Pay.
ACH Positive Pay
Automated Clearing House (ACH) transactions are on the rise – and with more transactions comes a greater risk of fraud, making an electronic fraud mitigation tool essential for your business. ACH Positive Pay is managed through your online banking platform, and allows only ACH transactions from a pre-approved list of parties to debit and/or credit your account.
Here’s how it works:
- Hills Bank Online users create a list of authorized vendors with the option to set a dollar thresholds for certain vendors.
- When a company initiates an ACH Debit from your account, the company ID is matched to the list of authorized vendors.
- If an unauthorized ACH transaction attempted to debit the account, or the amount of the transaction exceeds the set limit, the transaction is flagged as an exception item and an electronic notification is generated early the following business day.
- Users are prompted to log in to online banking and decide to "pay" or "return" the transaction before the 11am deadline.
Note: As users make decisions on exception items, they can also add that company to the list of authorized vendors so that future transactions will not trigger an exception alert.
Contact a Treasury Management Representative at 1-800-445-5725 (1-800-HILLSBK) for more information on Check Positive Pay.
Account Reconciliation
With Account Reconciliation you can conveniently balance your account through Hills Bank Online.
Here’s how it works:
- You download/business-banker reconciliation files from Hills Bank online and upload them to your accounting system
- Bank activity is matched against the accounting system
- This determines outstanding items, resulting in a balanced account
At Hills Bank, we are proud to offer these services to protect your business not only from fraud, but also the problems that go along with correcting a fraud situation. Contact a Treasury Management Representative at 1-800-445-5725 (1-800-HILLSBK) to discuss other ways we can help protect your finances.