If you're like us, you're probably getting more and more accustomed to sending and receiving money online. Credit cards, as much as we hate paying those merchant fees, are a necessary cost of doing business for most companies. If you're working internationally, then the venerable interbank wires - and all their costs - are probably a big part of your life as well. Most compellingly, there are no-fee electronic debits and credits such as ACH transactions in the U.S.
xTuple has some fair support for all of this, but we'd love to do more. For example, while we currently support multiple payment gateways for Accounts Receivable, we don't do much with credit cards on the Payables side just yet (but here's a spec - comments welcome!)
We do support ACH electronic checks in A/P that conform to the U.S. NACHA standard, and have received a patch to add the same (ABA) functionality for the Australian market. Are there users in other geographies that would like to see this functionality in the core product? The ACH check functionality was previously available only in the commercial Editions of the product, but starting with version 3.5, will be in the PostBooks core. (Here's the original spec.)
Speaking for myself, I'd love to support ACH on the A/R side - we do a great deal of business this way, but like a lot of you, I suspect, it's through our bank's website, which is a bit of a mess. For example, if we have a recurring payment set up with a customer (say $400/month for a 5-user license of the Standard Edition), we have to create that as a recurring transaction on the website, and are not able to modify it at all once it's active - only delete and start over. We use the Recurring Invoices functionality in xTuple to create the (unposted) invoice every month - but the Cash Receipt process is manual. Wouldn't it be cool to have that Recurring Invoice, once posted, automatically create an ACH debit request, and send that to the bank's API?
Speaking of (possibly nonexistent) bank APIs, it sure would be nice to have the ACH file output from A/P go automatically to the bank or some trusted intermediary as well. The current process at our bank involves loading that ACH (text) file into a Windows/IE-only web app on the bank website, which then checks the ACH file format, wraps it up in its own binary format, and then and only then processes it. Yuck.
If anyone's interested in helping to define how all this could work better, or could share pointers to relevant standards and such, please chime in with comments here. Thanks!
Ned Lilly
In October 2001, Ned co-founded xTuple, originally called OpenMFG, with the aim of bringing the worlds of open platform software and enterprise resource planning (ERP) together to solve the unmet needs of small- to mid-sized manufacturers. In 1999, he was a co-founder of Great Bridge, an early business built around the PostgreSQL database which is also the core technology for xTuple today. Great Bridge was incubated inside Landmark Communications, a mid-sized media company where Ned directed corporate venture investments, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and startup activity. Prior to Landmark, Ned worked for a regional technology group in Washington D.C. and had a brief first career in political media — television, radio and a non-partisan news wire. He holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia and an M.A. from George Washington University.