Introduction to Payments
In this Payments guide, you'll learn how to utilize the Trovata payment experience to submit various payment types, establish fine-grained workflows for approval management, and utilize bulk & templated payments.
Supported Connections
Note: Currently, international payments are only supported via JPM, with more international support coming soon.
Institution | Connection Type | Payment Support | Payment Types |
J.P. Morgan | API | Domestic & International (UK, Germany, Australia, India, Japan, Canada, Poland) | Wire, ACH, RTP, Transfers |
Bank of America | API | Domestic | Wire, ACH, RTP, Transfers |
Wells Fargo | API | Domestic | Wire, ACH, RTP, Transfers |
SVB | API | Domestic | Wire, ACH, RTP, Transfers |
PNC | API | Domestic | Wire, ACH, RTP, Transfers |
US Bank | API | Domestic | Wire, ACH, RTP, Transfers |
HSBC | API | Domestic | Wire |
Citi | API | Domestic | Wire |
How Does Trovata Handle Payments?
It’s important to note that Trovata does not process any payments – we help our customers orchestrate payments within our platform.
Payments can be initiated through Trovata, which leverages bank APIs to then send them to the banks directly (without the need for a third party intermediary).
In the end, it’s the banks who are processing the payments and provide back their status information, so that they can easily be tracked within Trovata.
Benefits of the Trovata Payments Experience
Trovata is the only bank API-based payment experience that replaces bank portals safely, manages approvals, and delivers Real-Time Payment (RTP) capabilities with zero transaction fees.
Key Highlights:
Send payments securely with zero transaction fees to and from any bank /ERP.
Handle payments on-the-go with our mobile app.
Customize payment workflows, making them as fine-grained with the option to add stages for review and approval, with custom rules for added checks.
Track the payment from the minute it is sent over to the bank until completion.
Users
Payments User Roles/Tasks
Initiator: The user who creates the payment
Reviewer: Second level of payment approval
Approver: The user who is entitled to approve one or more workflow stages. Preparer, Reviewer, Approver, and Releaser are four types of “Approvers” that can be applied to any user profile. Third level of payment approval
Releaser: Fourth and final level of payment approval
Admins
Payment Admin/User permissions are set in the Entitlements section of Settings
Dual Admins → Dual Approvals
Dual approvals are automatically enforced when the payments app has two or more admins listed in the users section
All admins receive both an email and an in-app notification at the top of the Payments page when a standard approval (and dual approval) process starts
Admin Tasks
Create, modify, and delete payment templates
Create, modify, and delete workflows
Create, modify, and delete users
Modify account details
Payment Permission Settings
Now, you might be asking, “Okay, well, there’s a lot of highly sensitive information when it comes to payments, who is allowed to actually read these payments, who can initiate them, who is allowed to edit workflows, and who’s allowed to edit templates?”
In the settings area of Trovata, you are able to configure those permissions within User Groups.
User Groups are groups of users with a set of permissions that are meant for the entire Trovata app. That means, based on the User Group, you can grant specific permissions.
For example, if you look at your Admin User Group in Trovata, you can see all the users within it and the permissions they have in the Entitlements section. Looking at payments specifically, for example, you could see that everyone in this User Group is allowed to read a payment, initiate a payment, and so on.
Typically, only the Admin or the Account Owner can update user permissions.
When you onboard to the Trovata Payments Experience, our team will do an in-depth analysis alongside you to make sure we can, first, create the most effective workflows for your needs, and second, ensure the entitlements for your company makes sense for payments specifically, working through permissions with you.
Payment Dashboard
When you click “Payments” in Trovata’s main navigation, you will arrive at the Payments Dashboard which shows you a list of all of the payments that have ever submitted through Trovata at a glance.
Each Payment Record in this section will have a name, initiation date, origin account “From”, beneficiary account “To”, amount, payment type and status. Some of the statuses you will see are Trovata-specific and the other statuses are based on information from the banks.
See table below for payment status descriptions.
Payment Status | Description | Available Actions |
Open | Payment has been created and is being routed through the approval workflow (assigned at the account level) | Approve, Reject, Cancel |
Canceled | Payment has been canceled by the payment initiator | N/A |
Rejected | Payment has been rejected by an approver | N/A |
Approved | All required approvals are complete. The initiator of the payment can submit the funds for processing | Submit, Cancel |
Processing | Payment is being sent to the bank (Only in this state for a few seconds) | N/A |
Submitted | Payment has been successfully sent to the bank | N/A |
Failed | Payment has failed submitting to bank | N/A |
Pending | Payment awaiting processing (off hours) | N/A |
Rejected by Bank | Payment has been rejected by the institution | N/A |
Completed | Payment has been completed and funds have moved | N/A |
Initiating Payments (3 Types)
3 Ways to Initiate Payments
On the right side of the Payments Dashboard, you will find a blue button called “New Payment.”
This is where you can initiate a new payment, choosing from three options: manual, template, or bulk.
Let’s look at each in-depth:
Manual Payments
As it sounds, sending a manual payment flow is very straightforward and will be similar to what you’ve likely experienced when sending a payment via bank portal.
Here’s the process of sending a manual payment:
Select the account that you want the money to come out of.
Select your payment type, whether it’s ACH, real-time payments (RTP), transfer or wire.
Input all of the beneficiary’s information.
Then, enter the payment amount information.
Finally, you will be able to review and submit that payment and give it a name.
It’s that easy!
Another great benefit here is that you can choose to send it upon release, which is immediate, or you can actually schedule it to send it out in the future.
Once you submit this payment, whichever workflow is tied to the account that the payment was disbursed from, will be triggered (which we will go over in the next step).
Make a Payment From a Template
To make a payment from a template, the process is very similar. However, the first step is to select from a pre-configured template that you want to use. You will go through all the same steps as above, however, the beneficiary information will be pre-populated for you.
Similar to manual payments, payments from a template can also be scheduled immediately or for a future date.
Bulk Payments
Bulk payments are a very exciting feature that we recently released, only available in Trovata. With bulk payments, we allow you to upload a CSV file which can have payments for multiple banks and it can even contain multiple payment types as well.
Currently, Trovata supports bulk ACH, Domestic Wire and RTP payments. As far as the fields go for the CSV file, we do have format requirements. You can download our CSV template to see exactly how to format the columns.
Once you create the bulk payment template, you can manually upload it via CSV or there is the option to have an automated file upload via an SFTP through your ERP system. If you prefer that process, Trovata can work with you to set you up with an SFTP client so you don’t have to manually upload the CSV.
What’s different about bulk payments versus batch payments?
We created bulk payments to overcome some of the hurdles that teams face when it comes to making batch payments.
When you think about a batch payment, all those payments are going to one specific bank only. Once they’re sent to that bank, you must go through the entire process of un-batching them after they’ve been submitted. And, unfortunately, if one of the payments in the batch fails, the entire batch fails. So that means every single payment in that batch has to now be resubmitted.
Alternately, what happens when you send a bulk payment in Trovata?
You can use multiple banks and multiple payment types and each payment gets submitted as individual payments to the banks. So if one of the payments in the bulk fails, the entire bulk doesn’t fail, the rest of your payments can still successfully be submitted.
Now that you’re familiar with the Payments Dashboard and know the different types of payments, it’s time to set up your payment workflows.
Payment Workflows
The most customizable part of Trovata’s Payment experience, workflows allow you to have as much fine-grained control as possible regarding the payments that you send to the bank.
Workflows are as customizable as possible so that, whether you work in a smaller company with a one-person treasury department, or you’re at a large enterprise that requires several checks and balances to be in place before sending a payment, Trovata can fit your needs.
How to set up a payment workflow:
First, give your workflow a name.
Then, add a bank account or accounts to that workflow. This means, anytime a payment is being submitted from those specific accounts, this workflow will be triggered because it’s tied to those accounts. Note, you can have multiple accounts attached to a single workflow, but you cannot have the same account attached to two different workflows.
Next, input who is allowed to initiate the payment. You can put all the Trovata users in your payment group that you want to be able to initiate a payment.
Then, you have the option to set a maximum payment amount.
Now, you can optionally add review and approve steps to the workflow and determine the roles for each. These steps can also have customizable rules that offer more checks. For example, if a payment is greater than $1,000 the approver can only be Jane Doe.
Finally, input who can release the payment and confirm your workflow and then save it!
Payment Templates
Again, creating a payment template in Trovata will be similar to how you may have done it before using a bank portal.
You can set up a new template by navigating to the templates dashboard.
Here is a view of the templates dashboard in Trovata Payments.
The first step will be to name the template, and then you choose the specific payment type for it – whether it’s ACH, RTP, or Wire.
Next, add all of the rest of the information and then you can confirm and save the template.
Once it is saved, you can see all of your templates on the templates dashboard. Then, when you go to create a new payment using a template, all the available template options will come up and once you select a template, all the beneficiary information will be auto-populated for you.
FAQs
1). Who can create or modify templates, workflows, and/or account details?
Admins are the only users who can create or modify templates, workflows and/or account details. Approval by another admin is only required if your Trovata Payments instance has more than one admin.
2). Which users can initiate a payment?
Only users set up as "Initiators" on various Workflows can set up a payment.
Summary of Payments
And that wraps up how you can get started with Trovata’s Payments experience! As you can see, there are plenty of ways to take advantage of the various payment types (RTP, Transfer, ACH, and Wire) and payment methods (Manual, Template, Bulk).