EPN, the ACH payments business of The Clearing House Payments Company L.L.C., introduced the EPN STP 820 to facilitate straight-through-processing for business-to-business electronic payments. The standard enables corporate trading partners to transmit detailed remittance information within their electronic ACH payment and allows recipients to automatically record the transactions in their internal accounting systems. The EPN STP 820 standard is supported by NACHA and the Association of Financial Professionals (AFP).

"EPN STP 820 is an increasingly popular standard that avoids unnecessary complexity," said Debbie Glasser, Vice President of Treasury Software. "The adoption of any standard is ultimately decided on its ease of implementation and ease of use. EPN STP 820 meets both of those criteria."

ACH Universal generates the electronic payment and remittance information in accordance with the EPN STP 820 standard. Without custom installation, ACH Universal will accept data from any major accounting package from QuickBooks to PeopleSoft. ACH Universal provides a secure, easy-to-use solution for automated business-to-business transactions within the EPN STP 820 format.

"Treasury Software's adoption of the EPN STP 820 standard moves the industry a step closer to true straight-through-processing and eliminates the barriers of business-to-business electronic payments," said Rossana Salaris, Senior Vice President of Electronic Payments Network. "Treasury Software's commitment to EPN STP 820 further demonstrates the need for a common standard for both accounting and cash management packages to provide an electronic business-to-business payments option to their customers."

ACH Universal will incorporate ACH2Excel, which will parse out an EPN STP 820 file into tabular format. In addition to providing the capability to create an EPN STP 820 file from a payment system, this solution will convert the EPN STP 820 file into an importable format for a receivable module. "This will promote further acceptance of the standard by third party developers and Value Added Resellers (VARs)," according to Glasser.

ACH Universal transmission options include fully automated File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Secure Socket Layers (SSL/FTPS), and key-exchange based encryption and signing, such as PGP.