How eChecks Work: The Payment Journey From Authorization to Reconciliation
Three clicks on the surface. Five stages underneath. From where the sender sits, an eCheck is barely a process at all. You fill in the details, approve it, and wait for a confirmation. Three clicks and it is someone else’s problem. Underneath that is a sequence with five distinct stages, and each one can fail in its own particular way. Understanding how eChecks work at each stage is what lets you tell a customer why their payment has not arrived, or explain to a vendor what a returned transaction actually means, without guessing. How eChecks work depends on which way the money is going One thing has to be settled first, because the journey is genuinely different depending on the answer. If you are sending, you are paying someone with a digital check. It reaches them by email, and they print it or deposit it through their own bank app much as they would a check that arrived in the post. If you are collecting, your customer is authorizing you to pull funds from their bank account...