ACH vs Real-time

Getting paid for your work, whether it’s from your vendors or from your employer, historically takes time to transact. The new norm is getting paid as you finish your work. In other words, within the same day, you see your hard-earned cash in the bank. You may hear two common terms tossed around this topic: Same-Day ACH and Real-Time Payments.

What’s the difference? Although small, the answer may just be the difference that your business and/or personal finances need to accelerate exponentially. Here’s a simple yet important explanation behind the difference between Same-Day ACH and Real-Time Payments.

Thanks to innovative technology, outdated processes and systems have been replaced and even automated. One of those being the processing time of payments between businesses and consumers. Although the technology exists, not all businesses today process payments on the same day the transaction is initiated. But did you know that payments are able to process in real-time, meaning minutes or seconds of being initiated?

ACH stands for “Automated Clearing House.” Without getting into the boring details, long story short it’s the US system for clearing/processing payments between banks. The Same Day ACH is simply a payment, sent or received, that is processed on the same day that it is initiated, usually completed within a few hours’ time.

If you performed work for a company on a contractual basis consulting their web development team, they might pay you once agreed that the work has been done. If they use a Same-Day ACH payment processor, you would be paid the very day you finished your work.

The downside is that “same-day” is often calculated using “business days” depending on the company processing the payments (something to verify/confirm with your provider). Taking the same example as above, if your payment processed the same business day, and you completed your consulting work on Friday evening at 6:30 pm, you would not see your money until the following Monday.

Real-Time Payments are becoming the new norm among businesses and consumers. Why? Real-time payments don’t take hours or “business days” to complete, but rather they take just seconds for payments to be sent and received regardless of day or time.

If you’re a local handyman that fixes air conditioners, once your job is completed and the credit card is swiped, your payment is received in your bank account within seconds time! Due to the relative newness of real-time payments, few businesses even exist that provide real-time payments, and even fewer are user-friendly and cost-effective…until now…

OfficeCard is a Real-Time Payment solution designed to make sending and receiving payments convenient for businesses and consumers.

With OfficeCard real-time payments, you can:

• Send instant payments to your agent or employee.
• Email monetary rewards or incentives within your company.
• Manage all your expenses in one central location with the convenience of real-time payments.
• Integrate real-time payments with your enterprise software you already use for other vital company operations.

By linking your current bank account to OfficeCard, or using one of OfficeCard’s innovative debit cards, you benefit from the convenience of having your money paid to you when your work is complete, rather than waiting for days’ time to get paid.