Making an Old National Bank positive pay file (ONPointe Treasury)
Old National Bank runs check positive pay through its ONPointe Treasury platform (smaller businesses may use ONPointe Essentials). The service compares each check that hits your account against a list of checks you reported as issued. If a check number or dollar amount does not match, or a check you never wrote shows up, the item is flagged for you to pay or return before it clears. That list of issued checks is the "issue file," and getting it formatted correctly is the part that trips most people up.
The good news with Old National is that the issue-file layout is not locked to a single rigid template. ONPointe Treasury lets you configure how your file is read, which means you can produce a file from almost any accounting system and tell the bank where each piece of data sits.
How check positive pay works at Old National
The cycle is straightforward once it is set up:
- You write or print checks during the day.
- You export an issue file (check number, amount, issue date, and usually account number and a paid/void status) and upload it to ONPointe Treasury, or key the issues in by hand.
- The bank matches presented checks against your issued list overnight.
- Any mismatch becomes an "exception" you review the next morning and decide to pay or return.
Old National's published guidance puts the cutoff to upload a check positive pay issue file for that night's processing at 8:00 pm ET / 7:00 pm CT. Upload after that and your checks may not be on file when they present the next day, which causes false exceptions. Build the cutoff into your routine.
The ONPointe issue file: delimited or fixed record
Inside ONPointe Treasury, check issues live in the Check Issue Management widget. Two import file formats are supported: a delimited file (such as comma-separated CSV) and a fixed-record file (where each field occupies a set range of character positions). You upload through the Import Issue Files tab and pick which of the two formats your file uses.
Before your first upload, you set up the Import Mapping tab. That is where you tell ONPointe which column or character positions hold the check number, the amount, the issue date, the account number, and the payee or status fields. Because you define the map, you are not forced to rearrange your export to fit a fixed bank template. You line the map up to your file once, and after that the same export works every time.
This page does not reproduce a fixed field-by-field layout for Old National, and you should be cautious of any source that claims to. The exact fields, their order, the date format, and whether amounts include a decimal or are zero-padded depend on the map your company configures and on what your treasury setup expects. The authoritative reference is the file specification and import-mapping instructions inside your own ONPointe Treasury portal, or the spec your Old National treasury management contact provides. Pull that before you build anything.
Where most check registers fall short
QuickBooks, Xero, and similar tools keep a perfectly good record of every check you wrote, but none of them export a bank positive pay file natively. QuickBooks in particular has no built-in positive pay export at all. So even with clean books, you still have to turn that register into a file shaped the way ONPointe reads it. That conversion step is the gap.
You have a few ways to close it:
- Reformat by hand in a spreadsheet. Workable for a handful of checks, but error-prone and tedious every cycle, and a single misplaced column can throw off the whole upload.
- Use a converter. A tool takes your register and outputs a file matching the layout your bank reads.
- Key issues in manually. ONPointe also lets you enter issues directly, which is fine for low volume but does not scale.
Build your Old National file with PositivePayMaker
PositivePayMaker is a free, browser-based converter. You load your check register as CSV or Excel, map your columns to check number, amount, issue date, and any status field, and it produces the positive pay file. Because Old National's import mapping is flexible, the most reliable path is to use the custom format builder to match a delimited (CSV) or fixed-width layout to the map you configured in ONPointe, then upload that file. If your treasury setup expects a specific column order or date format, you replicate it exactly in the builder.
A few things worth knowing about the tool. It runs entirely in your browser, so your check data never gets uploaded to a server or sent anywhere. It is free, with no install, no Windows requirement, and no per-month fee. It includes 11 bank layouts (six built from published specifications, including Chase and Huntington), the custom builder for everything else, and a file validator to sanity-check your output before you send it. For Old National specifically, the custom builder plus generic CSV or fixed-width preset is the right starting point, since the bank does not publish one universal fixed layout.
When a paid desktop tool makes sense
If you generate positive pay files for many accounts daily, or want a packaged Windows application with vendor support, paid options exist. Big Red Consulting's Positive Pay File Creator runs about $119 the first year and $99/year after, is Windows-only, and its QuickBooks Online edition needs Excel installed. Treasury Software's Bank Positive Pay is an installed Windows product, roughly $29.95 to $89.95 per month, with 350+ prebuilt layouts. MoneyThumb and ProperSoft also sell paid desktop converters. For a single business reformatting one register on a normal schedule, a free browser tool usually covers it; higher-volume shops may prefer the support and saved-template depth of a paid product.
Verify the first file before you trust it
Whatever you use, treat the first generated file as a test. Upload it to ONPointe Treasury well ahead of the cutoff, confirm the bank accepted it without errors, and check that your issued checks actually show up on the matched list. Field order, date format, and amount formatting are the usual culprits when a file is rejected. Once one clean cycle goes through, the same setup runs reliably from then on.
For more on layouts and how the pieces fit together, see our positive pay file format reference and the QuickBooks positive pay guide.