Virtual cards are a payment option made available by banks to replace traditional check or EFT payments to vendors. Virtual cards are sometimes also referred to as ePayments or ePayables. A vendor signs up for a virtual card and a virtual card is assigned to each vendor upon approval. Some advertised benefits of this payment option are efficiencies in manual paper payments elimination, improvement in cash flow and speed of payment, and minimization of fraud risk. The availability of this new payment option is configurable in the Advantage application through existing functionality; however, the generation of required electronic file content based on bank specific file requirements will require scripting at each site.
There are several available configurable options for tracking of virtual card payments, this section will focus on the most commonly utilized configuration and things to consider. The primary business process to consider is the bank requirement for virtual card payment files format transmission. If your bank requires a standard, Advantage support NACHA format for transmission of virtual card payments, your site should consider Configurable Option 1: NACHA formatted transmission files. If your bank requires a non-standard, unsupported format for transmission of virtual card payments, your site should consider Configurable Option 2: Unsupported format transmission files.