Commerce Bank Positive Pay: How It Works and How to Build Your Check-Issue File
Commerce Bank (Commerce Bancshares) offers positive pay to its business and commercial customers as part of its payments and treasury services. Positive pay is a check fraud control: you send the bank a list of the checks you issued, and when a check is presented for payment, Commerce Bank compares it against your list. Anything that does not match is flagged for you to review.
This page explains how positive pay works at Commerce Bank, what goes into a check-issue file, and how to build a file that matches your account using the free custom format builder on this site. The exact file layout comes from the bank at setup, so treat the layout details below as the general shape, not a fixed spec.
What Commerce Bank offers
Commerce Bank lists several related fraud controls on its corporate payments and treasury pages. According to the bank, the checks you issue are uploaded electronically into the Commerce Bank Positive Pay system, which then compares the amount on file with the check when it is presented for payment. Based on the bank's own descriptions, the relevant services are:
- Positive Pay. The standard service. It matches presented checks against your issued-check file and flags discrepancies.
- Premium Positive Pay. This goes a step further and verifies the check's payee information against the electronic file you provided. This is the bank's version of payee positive pay, and it usually requires a payee name in your file.
- Reverse Positive Pay. Instead of you sending issued checks, the bank provides a daily file of paid items that you compare against your own records. See positive pay vs reverse positive pay for the difference.
- ACH Risk Manager. A separate ACH control that authorizes ACH transactions matching criteria you set and blocks the rest.
Discrepancies are reported through an email alert and appear in Commerce Connections, the bank's online cash management system, where you make an online pay or no-pay decision on each flagged item. You can confirm the current product descriptions on the bank's fraud prevention page.
What a check-issue file contains
A positive pay check-issue file is just a structured list of the checks you wrote. Commerce Bank provides the exact layout when your service is set up, and it can vary by account, so do not assume field positions from another bank or another company. That said, almost every check-issue file carries the same core fields:
- Account number. The checking account the checks are drawn on.
- Check or serial number. The individual check number.
- Amount. The dollar amount. Some layouts use a decimal point; others use an implied decimal, where
125000means1250.00. Confirm which one your account expects. - Issue date. The date you wrote the check, usually
MM/DD/YYYYorYYYYMMDD. - Action or status code. A flag that marks the record as issued or void. Sending voids matters, because a voided check that is never reported can be paid in error. See void checks in positive pay.
- Payee name. Optional for standard positive pay, but required if you use Premium Positive Pay for payee matching.
For more detail on how these fields are arranged in fixed-width and CSV files, see the positive pay file format reference.
The upload workflow in Commerce Connections
The general flow at Commerce Bank looks like this:
- Issue your checks and export a check register or issued-check report from your accounting software.
- Build a check-issue file that matches the layout Commerce Bank gave you, including any void records.
- Log in to Commerce Connections and upload the file before the bank's cutoff time so it posts that day.
- When a presented check does not match, the bank sends an email alert and posts the item in Commerce Connections as an exception.
- Review each exception and make a pay or no-pay decision before the decision cutoff. If you miss the cutoff, the account's default rule applies, so confirm that default with the bank.
Cutoff times for both file delivery and exception decisions are set by the bank and can differ by account, so get them in writing from your treasury contact. See positive pay cutoff times for why this matters.
Build a matching file from your check register
If your accounting software does not export a file in Commerce Bank's exact layout, you can build one here for free. Start from a check register or issued-check report, then use the custom format builder to map your columns to the fields Commerce Bank expects: account number, check number, amount, issue date, the issued or void code, and a payee name if you use Premium Positive Pay.
The builder supports both fixed-width and CSV output, an implied decimal or a real decimal point, and your choice of date format, so you can match the bank's spec field by field. If you keep your books in QuickBooks, the QuickBooks positive pay guide walks through the export. You can paste a sample through the file validator to catch formatting problems before you upload.
Verify your first file with the bank
This is the one step you should not skip. Because the layout is account-specific and set by Commerce Bank, the only reliable way to confirm your file is correct is to send a real one and have the bank check it. Build your first Commerce Bank positive pay file with the generator, upload a small batch, and ask your treasury contact to verify that every field, especially the amount format and the issued or void code, reads correctly on their end. Once a real file passes, you can reuse the same format every cycle with confidence.