BACS Pre-Submission Validation

Purpose

When building an automated BACS submission workflow, this node is responsible for checking and the transactions in the submission and validating them against BACS or Faster Payment scheme rules and other paygate security configuration

Background

Workflow Configuration

Service

The Pressubmission Validation nodecan be used to validate both BACS and Fatser Payment submissions. Due to differences in the scheme rules you must tell the node what type of submission it will be validating. The workflow will then validate the submisison using the correct set of rules for the payment service.

Reference

This is the submission reference. This is used throughout paygate such as in reports and submission history. You’ll want to give the reference a meaningful title such as ‘Payment run’ or ‘Monthly DDs’. The reference has a maximum length of 18 alpha numeric characters.

Contra Narrative

Exception Handling Bahaviour

This section describes the configuration option of handling exceptions (errors) during the automated workflow.

In an automated the name of the gamne is to carry out as much processing as possible in an automated way. This would be fine if payment data was always 100% clean and valid. In the real-world errors creep into payment data and paygate is able to scan a payment file and determine which transactions are valid and which will cause a payment problem.

All payment instructions must validate

The default setting is ‘All payment instructions must validate before the entire submission can continue’. In this configuration, all of the individual transactions in the entire payment submission must correctly validate or the entire submission is halted and the workflow will stop.

Remove invalid transactions

The deefault setting may be a little inflexible to you and you may wish to try and submit as many ‘good’ transactions as possible. During pre-submission validation, paygate grades error in a number of ways:

Fix

These are transactions that will definitely fail. Since they will definitely fail, Paygate will never attempt to submit them to BACS or Faster Payments.

Warnings

These are transactions that paygate has determined may cause a problem during the clearing and settlement process. You can remove these transactions from the submission by checking teh ‘Warning’ check box. If you do not select thjis option and warnings are found - paygate will attempt to submitt them but they may fail at a later stage.

Duplicates

Duplicate transactions in a payment file is often a sign of a probklem in the payment data. When you select the Duplicates option, paygate will remove all duplicates from the submission. There are always, at least, two duplicates and both are removed. We remove both duplicates (rather than leaves one) because it is an ambiguity they proably requires a manual review.

Save removed transactions to a file

If transactions are removed from a submission, paygate can compile a report of those transactions and the reason why they were removed. By selecting this option paygate will compile the removed transactions and save them to a location on your paygate file area. A number of file formats are available: - Simple CSV - Simple JSON

Save Path

This is the location in your paygate secure file area where either the CSV or JSON formatted list of removed transactions will be stored.

Pre-Submission Validation Errors.

The Pre-Submission Validation stage will store any messages that are produced. These messages could be:

• Fixes: Error that will cause BACS to fail the entire submission.
• Warning: Issues with the data in the submission that may indicate invalid data in the submission.
• Info: Various non-error messages

If a workflow fails because of pre-submission validation errors then you will want to view these messages so that the dta can be corrected. The workflow makes these messages available to you in the telemetry data that all workflows produce.

Telemetry data can be viewed in a number of ways:

Viewing Workflow Logs from within the client

While logged into the client, navigate the left-hand menu: Automation > Logging > Workflow and Mapping Logs.

The table show each instance of a workflow running. Find the instance of the workflow in the table and click the table row.

Is the workflow failed because of a pre-submission validation error this will be show in the Events table:

the actual pre-submission validation messages that cause the submission to fail can be found in the ‘Log Messages’ sections below the events.

We can see that the reason for th eworkflow failure is that the file used was a duplicate.

Note: Only the first 100 pre-sub validation message will be stored. In almost all cases this is sufficient to determine the cause of the workflow failure.

Receiving the workflow log by email.

It is usually preferable to recieve any workflow logs in a workflow report that Paygate can automatically generate and send to you in an email.

[Link to a page covering setting up a workflow report]