HeadACHe

Headache takes a lot of the guesswork out of building ACH (Automated Clearing House) files to move money around between banks.

Headache is built on top of the excellent Fixy gem for handling fixed-width files.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'headache'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install headache

Usage

It is outside of the scope of this document to describe NACHA's ACH file format. There are plenty of resources available that explain the syntax in detail.

Record Types

ACH files contain 5 different record types. They are:

• File Header Headache::Record::FileHeader
• Batch Header Headache::Record::FileHeader
• Entry Detail Headache::Record::Entry
• Batch Control Headache::Record::BatchControl
• File Control Headache::Record::FileControl

A batch itself is represented by Headache::Batch and the document is unsurprisingly Headache::Document.

Building an ACH Document

Headache provides some convenience out-of-the-box if you only plan to generate ACH files that contain a single batch, however there's nothing stopping you from implementing multiple batches.

Calling #batch or #first_batch will automatically create a Headache::Batch if the document's batch list is empty. #batch will raise an exception if the document contains multiple batches.

All ACH fields are represented and available to you. Headache attempts to abstract batch header and control records, allowing you to specify those details directly on the Batch object itself, but more granular control over that data is available if needed.

Further, Headache abstracts an ACH record definition from the record itself; so should you need to create your own record and document objects, you're free to re-use the definition mixins for this purpose.

Create a new ACH document (some optional fields are omitted in this example):

ach_doc = Headache::Document.new.tap do |document|
  document.header.tap do |file_header|
    file_header.destination_name = '1ST INTERNET BANK'
    file_header.destination      = '111111111' # Originating DFI number
    file_header.origin_name      = 'ACME CORP'
    file_header.origin           = '1111111111'
    file_header.reference_code   = '11111111'
  end

  document.batch.tap do |batch|
    batch.type                   = :debit
    batch.odfi_id                = '11111111'
    batch.company_identification = '1111111111'
    batch.batch_number           = 1
    batch.effective_date         = Date.today
    batch.company_name           = 'ACME CORP FTW'
    batch.entry_description      = 'My Description'
    batch.entry_class_code       = 'WEB'
    batch.discretionary          = 'My Discretionary Data'

    # Now, for each credit/debit, generate an Entry ...
    batch << Headache::Record::Entry.new.tap do |entry|
      entry.routing_number   = '123456789'
      entry.account_number   = '1234567890'
      entry.amount           = -100_00 # $100.00 (negative, since we're debiting)
      entry.individual_name  = 'Bob Smith'

      # these fields are for your own tracking...
      entry.trace_number     = '1234567890'
      entry.internal_id      = '1234567890'
      entry.transaction_code = '1234567890'
    end
  end
end

Finally, you can generate the file:

ach_doc.generate_to_file 'ACH.txt'

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake false to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/teampayoff/headache.

Authors

Made possible by all of our contributors.