Electronic Payments / Direct Deposits

RefTown, in combination with KotaPay, offers an optional direct deposit service that is integrated with our financial invoicing features. Once an invoice is created, it is only a couple additional steps to make the payments directly to your officials accounts.

Officials can enter their checking account information into RefTown under their account profile. The complete account numbers will not be displayed back to the official or an administrator of the organization...only partial account numbers. The entered routing number will be validated against legal routing numbers. Due to the pattern rules of valid routing numbers, single digit typos can be detected and rejected. Account numbers have no specific pattern that can be checked. Officials will be asked to enter their account number twice to greatly reduce the risk of an error. If the two numbers don't match, it will be rejected.

Once officials have entered their direct deposit info, you can make direct deposits.

High Level steps to make direct deposits are...

Generate officials invoices
Select invoices you wish to pay for by direct deposit
1. There are a variety of ways to reach the list of payable invoices
Click
Click "Direct Deposit"
- You will now have a list of invoices that have a balance needing to be paid. This will list all invoices whether the official has entered their direct deposit information or not. Each line item (one per invoice) will indicate whether account information exists for that official.
- This listing will also provide a total for the cost of the batch (not including any fees for transactions to bad account numbers).
Verify items to be paid
If your account is configured to fund the payments with an ACH transfer, click "Send Authentication Codes for Selected Direct Deposits"
- This will send a text message to a predefined phone number with a 6-digit code.
- Enter the provided code in the appropriate box that will be shown on RefTown.

Click "Execute Selected Direct Deposits".

At this point the deposits will be submitted to our Banking partner and will be processed.

At no time will your organization's money ever be in an account operated by RefTown...all funds will be transferred directly from your bank account to KotaPay, a long established electronic funds processing operation that is a subsidiary of Wells Fargo Bank, and then to your officials' bank accounts.

These transactions will be started through either a wire from your bank to KotaPay or an ACH transfer to KotaPay. A wire guarantees the funds to KotaPay and allows the payments to be made more quickly---next business day if the batch is submitted before the cutoff time. An ACH transfer is held until the fund clear before making payments.

All fees incurred as a result of submitting a batch will automatically be charged to the organization as an additional direct deposit from the account from which your direct deposit funds are also drawn.

The overall cost per transaction can be cheaper than printing and mailing checks and is far more efficient.

This function requires that your organization enter a 3-way contract with KotaPay and RefTown allowing RefTown to facilitate electronic transactions initiated by you to be processed by KotaPay.