Overview
Unit allows you to originate next day and same day ACH payments.
For more information on originating ACH payments, please refer to Unit's ACH Guide
In Unit, an ACH payment originates from a Deposit Account. The entity on the other side of the payment is called a Counterparty. A counterparty is a combination of routing number, account number, account type, and name.
Each ACH payment has a direction - either Debit or Credit. In the context of ACH payment origination, the directions work as follows:
- Debit - the payment "pulls" funds from the counterparty account. The amount is credited to the originating deposit account on Unit. It may take several banking (business) days for the credit to be settled, depending on the settings for your organization.
- Credit - the payment "pushes" funds to the counterparty account. The amount is debited from the originating deposit account immediately.
Originating an ACH payment supports Idempotency, to ensure that multiple identical requests will have the same effect as a single request.
ACH payment originations (both Debit and Credit) are subject to soft and hard daily amount limits determined by the account's deposit product. Once the Soft limit is exceeded, payments will automatically be submitted for manual review. Debit ACHs can only be manually approved if a balance check for the counterparty is successful.
Once you exceed the account's total daily limit, payments will be created under the Rejected status code, and the relevant API responses will contain the exact reason.
You may contact Unit to change the limits for an account or a group of accounts. See the Limits section for more information.
ACH Statuses
The ACH network operates in batches. When you originate an ACH payment, it will be created with a Pending status. You may track a payment's progress using the status attribute or listening to relevant webhooks, such as payment.sent.
The possible status values are listed below and you should be prepared to receive all statuses:
| Status | Description |
|---|---|
Pending | The payment was created on the Unit ledger but was not yet delivered to the ACH network. Payments with Pending status may be canceled by the originator. |
PendingReview | The payment is pending review by Unit. |
Rejected | The payment was rejected due to insufficient funds or exceeding daily ACH limits (see Error Codes for more details) |
Clearing | (Debit only) The payment was sent but the deposit account was not credited yet. |
Sent | The payment was processed by the ACH network. This is the final state for successful payments. |
Canceled | The payment was canceled. |
Same-day ACH
Same-day ACH enables your clients to send and receive funds using ACH the same day the payment is created. You can read more about same-day ACH in the relevant section of the Unit ACH guide.
The same day ACH functionality is disabled by default and is only available for specific use cases. If you would like to use same day ACH, please contact Unit.