How to create a Cathay Bank positive pay file
Cathay Bank offers positive pay to business and commercial customers as part of its treasury management fraud prevention services. The bank lists three related products: Positive Pay for Checks, Payee Positive Pay, and ACH Positive Pay. With check positive pay, each time you cut a batch of checks you send the bank a check issue file listing every check you wrote. When a check is presented for payment, Cathay Bank matches it against your issue file, and anything that does not line up becomes an exception you review and decide to pay or return.
The harder part for most bookkeepers is not the bank screens. It is producing the upload file in the layout Cathay Bank expects, because accounting software rarely exports it. QuickBooks, for example, has no native positive pay export at all. This page explains where the Cathay layout comes from, the general upload workflow, and how to build a matching file from a check register without buying desktop software.
Positive pay at Cathay Bank
Positive pay sits inside Cathay Bank's Treasury Management offering, under fraud prevention, and you work it through Cathay Business Online Banking. Two facts worth knowing from the bank's own materials:
- Payee Positive Pay compares the payee names in your check issue file against checks presented for payment. If a payee name does not match, the bank creates an exception and gives you the chance to pay or return the item. This only works if your issue file includes the payee, so it is one reason the file you upload matters.
- Cathay Business Mobile Banking includes Positive Pay approvals, so you can authorize pay or return decisions in real time from the mobile app, not only from a desktop browser.
Cathay Bank also runs ACH Positive Pay, a separate service that lets you set payment rules with ACH filters and blocks and review ACH debits that do not match a rule. That is a different product from check positive pay and does not use a check issue file. If you want background on the difference, see ACH positive pay explained and how payee positive pay works.
Where the exact Cathay Bank file layout comes from
Cathay Bank does not publish a single universal positive pay file format on its public website. Your account's exact check issue file layout is provided by the bank at setup, through your treasury management implementation contact or relationship manager, and it can vary by account and by the options you turned on, such as payee name verification. That is normal for treasury services, and it is the honest answer: get your spec in writing from Cathay Bank before you build anything. Do not copy field positions from a blog.
That said, a positive pay check issue file is built around the same core pieces of data no matter the bank. Expect your Cathay layout to carry some arrangement of:
- Account number, the disbursement account the checks were drawn on
- Check (serial) number
- Check amount
- Issue date
- Action code that marks whether each row is an issued check or a void or cancel
- Payee name, optional, and required only if you use Payee Positive Pay
Field order, the date format, the delimiter or fixed-width positions, whether the file includes a header or trailer row, and the exact action codes are the details that must come from the document Cathay Bank gives you. Treat the list above as the shape of the file, not a spec. The bank publishes a help guide titled Positive Pay Business Online Banking in its online banking help section, and that, plus your setup paperwork, is your source of truth.
The general upload workflow
Once you have your layout and have run the check batch in your accounting system, the routine looks like this:
- Pull a register of the checks you issued: check number, payee, amount, and issue date.
- Convert that register into the file format your Cathay Bank spec describes, with the right action codes and date format.
- Sign in to Cathay Business Online Banking and go to the positive pay / check issue section.
- Upload the file and confirm the bank accepted it. Item counts and dollar totals should match your register.
- Each day, review any exceptions the bank flags and make a pay or return decision before the cutoff, from the browser or the mobile app.
Submit issue files the same day you print checks, and always before the cutoff your bank gives you, so a legitimate check is never flagged simply because the bank had no record of it yet. Cathay Bank also offers Early Check Reporting, which shows the amount, check number, and image of items posting that morning, a useful cross-check against what you uploaded.
Build the file from your register, free
You can map a check register to a Cathay Bank-style issue file with our free, browser-based tool. PositivePayMaker takes a CSV or Excel export of your register and writes out a positive pay file. It runs entirely in your browser, so your check numbers, payee names, and amounts never get uploaded to a server.
Because Cathay's layout is account-specific, use the custom format builder: set the column order, the date format, the delimiter or fixed-width positions, and the action codes to match the document Cathay Bank gave you. Save that arrangement and reuse it every cycle. If the bank sends you a sample file, the built-in validator can check your output against the same shape before you upload. You can read the general field rules on our positive pay file format reference.
One step you should never skip: verify the very first file you generate with Cathay Bank. Upload it, confirm the bank accepts it cleanly, and check that the item count and dollar total match your register exactly. A single wrong column or date format can cause every check to reject. Once the first file clears, the format is settled and later runs are routine.