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 Rejections & Returns 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.
Custom Standard Entry Class (SEC) Codes
A Standard Entry Class (SEC) code is a mandatory three-letter code used in all ACH payments (originated and received) to identify certain types of ACH payments.
The SEC Code generally indicates:
- The nature of the transaction as consumer or corporate in nature. It indicates whether the funds transfer affects a consumer account or a corporate account at the RDFI (receiving depository financial institutions).
- Whether the transaction is single-entry or recurring.
- The specific computer record format that will be used to carry the payment and payment-related information relevant to the application.
The use of Custom Standard Entry Class (SEC) Code is currently limited to specific codes as described below:
| Direction | Customer Type | Supported SEC codes (ACH Origination) |
|---|---|---|
| Credit | Individual Business | WEB (*default), PPD CCD (default), PPD |
| Debit | Individual Business | Not Supported CCD (default), WEB |
The custom SEC code functionality is disabled by default. If you would like to enable it, please contact Unit.
*Individuals who are Sole Proprietors will have their default SEC code set to CCD.
Dynamic Clearing Period
Dynamic Clearing Period enables you to set the amount of days it will take an Originated ACH debit to clear and funds to become available in a deposit account. When this feature is enabled, the value that is passed as clearingDaysOverride, will replace the default amount of clearing days as it is defined in the deposit product.
In order to enable the Dynamic Clearing Period feature, new definitions of maximum clearing days and minimum clearing days will need to be added to the deposit product so the clearingDaysOverride attribute will support values between the minimum clearing days and the maximum clearing days.
If a clearing days override is not specified when the ACH debit is created, the clearing period will be set to the default clearing period set in the deposit product.
The clearing period can be changed after the ACH debit resource has been created, as long as it is still in Pending or PendingReview status.
The dynamic clearing period functionality is disabled by default. If you would like to enable it, please contact Unit.