ACH payments and disbursements aren’t new. ACH payments have been around since 1974, and by the end of 2016, the total volume of ACH processing exceeded $40 trillion. If you have made monthly AutoPay payments for your mortgage, paid a credit card bill or received salary as direct deposit, those transactions were via ACH.Any SaaS application that has a user base with recurring or subscription payments needs must include ACH payments as a payment rail option. In many cases ACH should be the defacto payment method for anything recurring. The simple fact is that ACH transactions have much lower processing costs than do credit card transactions. Further, credit card decline rates can cause havoc with recurring payments because of much higher decline rates. How the SaaS development team decides to manage recurring payments should be their choice. They may opt to utilize the ACH API’s recurring scheduling system or, manage the recurring schedule within their application.

Recurring ACH API For SAAS Platforms

Lower processing fees

While a successful ACH API integration largely depends on the business and their requirements itself, there are a few things that cross the requirement boundaries and apply to most all ACH integration needs.

Answering that question is largely dependent on what type of business you are and what the business model is. If your business or application is one that is subscription based or has a recurring payments component, then yes; there are a number of benefits to providing ACH payments as an option. Let's take a look at some of the benefits of an ACH Integration:

Checking Account Verification Systems

The ACH or echeck world does not have an authorization component as with credit cards. When processing credit cards you are able to authorize at the time of payment that the customer has the funds available on their cards. Most importantly you are able to reserve those funds for capture and settlement. So you know you are getting paid at the point of sale.

For some businesses this lack of an authorization means that a Checking Account Verification system to mitigate payment acceptance risk must be put in place.

Payment collection is generally considered the most important business task and the most dreaded. A recurring billing solution is a fantastic tool to ease the burdens associated with payment collection by making your SaaS application user’s business life easier and more profitable.

From a previous post we have already covered exactly what an ACH is and the raw flow between a business and the banks. So what is Processing of ACH Payments? First let's quickly re-examine the role the banks play; specifically as it relates to technology. NACHA  governs the ACH network, including providing the specific NACHA file format that banks must use when submitting batch files to one of the ACH operators. If there were no improvements that could be made anywhere in the process, there would be little need for Third Party ACH Processors (TPP).