Truist Positive Pay: Building Your Check Issue File
Positive pay at Truist works the way it does at most banks. You send the bank a list of the checks you issued, and the bank compares that list against checks that come in for payment. Anything that does not match becomes an exception you review before the deadline. The list you send is the check issue file, and getting its format right is the part that trips up most bookkeepers the first time.
This page covers where Truist handles positive pay, what the issue file generally contains, and how to produce a file that matches your account's setup. Truist configures positive pay per client, so the exact field map you need comes from Truist, not from a single fixed template. The honest version of the answer is below, with the parts you can verify and the parts you should confirm with your treasury contact kept separate.
Where Truist runs positive pay
Truist is the bank formed from the BB&T and SunTrust merger, and its treasury platforms carry that history. Business and commercial clients use Truist Treasury Manager (the platform that was SunView Treasury Manager on the SunTrust side) or Truist Digital Treasury (the former BB&T platform), both now reachable through Truist One View at oneview.truist.com. Inside One View, check issue management lives under Fraud Protection, in a section labeled Check issues and voids.
Truist offers three flavors of the service:
- Positive Pay matches each presented check against your issue file by check number and amount. Items that do not match become exceptions.
- Payee Positive Pay adds payee name matching on top of check number and amount, so an altered payee gets flagged too. This is why the payee field matters on many Truist setups.
- Reverse Positive Pay is for companies that cannot send issue data on time. You review all prior-day checks instead of submitting an issue list first.
One note from Truist's own transition material: clients who previously used basic positive pay to reject every check presented were moved to a separate Truist Check Block solution. If your account is set up to block rather than match, your workflow is different and you may not be uploading an issue file at all.
What goes in a Truist check issue file
A Truist check issue file carries one row per check, and the fields are the same ones every positive pay system needs: the account number, the check number, the dollar amount, the issue date, and an indicator showing whether the row is an issued check or a void. Because Payee Positive Pay is common at Truist, the payee name is frequently part of the layout as well.
Truist Treasury Manager imports these files through configurable file maps. That is the important detail. Rather than forcing one rigid format, the platform lets your file be mapped to the fields Truist expects, and bank-defined maps are available. The map can even supply a default Issue/Void value so you can leave that column out of the file entirely. The practical consequence is that two Truist customers can use slightly different file layouts and both work, because each is mapped on the bank side.
A widely circulated third-party description (from school finance vendor SchoolFi, not from Truist) shows a no-header CSV in this column order: check number, payee, amount, pay date, bank account number, and an issue/void indicator, with a row like 123456, John Smith, 150.50, 08/01/2022, 111111111, I where I marks an issued check. That is a reasonable starting point and matches the field set Truist's import handles. Treat it as an example, not gospel. Your account's map is what determines the column order, the date format, and the void code, so pull the file specification or map details for your specific account from One View or from your Truist treasury consultant before you rely on any layout.
Why QuickBooks will not just hand you this file
QuickBooks, whether Online or Desktop, does not export a positive pay file. There is no menu item for it. You can pull a check register or a transaction report that contains the right data, but turning that report into a Truist-formatted issue file is on you. People usually solve this by rearranging columns in Excel by hand, which is slow and easy to get wrong, or by running the export through a converter.
That conversion is what PositivePayMaker does. You upload your check register as CSV or Excel, map your columns once, and it writes a positive pay file in the layout your bank expects. The tool runs entirely in your browser, so your check data never leaves your computer and nothing is uploaded to a server. It is free to use.
Matching Truist's layout with the custom builder
Because Truist's import is map-driven and varies by client, the right approach is to build to your account's spec rather than a generic Truist preset. PositivePayMaker includes a custom format builder for exactly this. You tell it the column order, whether the file is delimited or fixed width, the date format, the void indicator your map expects, and whether to include a header row, then it produces matching files every time.
If your account uses the common CSV layout described above, set the builder to comma-delimited, no header, and arrange the fields in the check number, payee, amount, date, account, indicator order. If Truist gave you a different map, follow that instead. The builder does not care which bank you name; it cares that the output matches the spec you give it. You can also run a generated file through the file format reference to sanity-check field widths and delimiters before you send anything.
Always verify the first file
Send your first generated file to Truist as a test, or upload it and check that One View accepts and parses it correctly before you rely on the process. A positive pay file with a wrong date format or a misread void code can either reject on import or, worse, import cleanly but match incorrectly, which means legitimate checks get flagged or bad ones slip through. Confirm with your Truist treasury contact that the imported items show up the way you expect, then make it routine. Remember that after a file imports, it still has to be approved in One View before it is released to the bank.
When a paid desktop tool might fit better
For most small businesses converting a register now and then, a free browser tool covers the job. Higher-volume operations, or shops that want positive pay files generated as part of an installed accounting workflow, sometimes prefer a paid desktop product. Big Red Consulting's Positive Pay File Creator runs about $119 the first year and $99 per year after, is Windows-only, and the QuickBooks Online edition needs Excel installed. Treasury Software's Bank Positive Pay is an installed Windows application running roughly $29.95 to $89.95 per month with hundreds of prebuilt bank layouts, including support for Truist's field-mapping approach. Both are legitimate; the trade is recurring cost and a Windows install against a free in-browser converter. Pick by volume and how you work, not by which has the longer feature list.
If you bank elsewhere too, the same approach applies to other layouts. Our QuickBooks positive pay guide walks through exporting a usable register from QuickBooks first, which is the step before any of this.