How to Create a Positive Pay File From Yardi (Voyager and Breeze)
Yardi Voyager and Yardi Breeze both let you pay vendors by check, but neither ships a built-in export that produces a positive pay file in your bank's specific layout. There is no menu item that says "positive pay" and outputs a check issue file formatted for your bank. To meet a positive pay requirement, you pull your check data out of Yardi, clean it up, then convert it into the exact format your bank expects.
If positive pay is new to you, read what is positive pay first. In short, your bank matches every check that clears against a list of checks you issued by check number, amount, and often the payee. Anything that does not match gets flagged before it pays. The list you send is the positive pay file, also called a check issue file.
Does Yardi have a native positive pay export?
Some accounting systems include a built-in positive pay format. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, for example, has an Export Positive Pay File action with bank-specific data exchange definitions. Yardi is different. Yardi Voyager's banking features center on Yardi Bill Pay for issuing EFT and printed check payments, and on automatic bank reconciliation, which imports BAI2 statement files from your bank to clear transactions. That is the reverse direction, the bank telling Yardi what cleared, not Yardi telling the bank what you issued.
If your Yardi environment has a custom positive pay export configured by your bank or a consultant, and it already matches your bank's spec, use it. Otherwise, you export the check data and convert it yourself.
Step 1: Pull the check data in Voyager
In Yardi Voyager, the cleanest source for issued checks is the Check Summary report under Analytics > Financial > AP Analytics. It lists the disbursements (checks) for the period you choose. Set the Property and the date range to cover the checks you need, then run the report. Voyager reports can be run to screen, PDF, or Excel; choose Excel so you get rows and columns to work with.
Confirm the export includes a check number, the check date, the amount, and the payee or vendor name. Banks match on check number and amount at a minimum, and many also match the payee. If a column you need is missing, your team may have a custom AP report or a Yardi Spreadsheet Reporting (YSR) template that includes it.
Step 2: Pull the payment data in Breeze
Yardi Breeze handles this differently. To review payment activity, log in and go to Reporting > Electronic Payments, which shows the payments processed through Bill Pay. For payments by check, look at your vendor payment and bank account reports under Reporting to get the check number, date, amount, and payee. Export to Excel or CSV. Either way, the goal is a spreadsheet with one row per issued check and clean columns.
Step 3: Filter to issued checks only
A positive pay file lists checks you wrote, nothing else. Before you convert, strip out anything that is not an issued check:
- Remove EFT and ACH payments. Yardi Bill Pay sends money by electronic funds transfer when the payee has bank details, and prints a check only when it does not. Electronic payments have no check number and do not belong in a check positive pay file. For protecting electronic payments, see ACH positive pay.
- Drop blank check numbers. Any row without a real check number is not an issued check and will be rejected by the bank.
- Decide how to handle voids. Some banks want voided checks reported with a void status so the bank knows never to pay them. Check your bank's spec, then handle voids the way it asks. See void checks in positive pay.
Step 4: Watch the amount and date columns
Two formatting issues cause most rejected files.
Amount. Confirm the amount column is a plain number such as 1542.00, not text with a currency symbol or separator like $1,542.00. Some bank layouts expect no decimal point, where 1542.00 is written as 154200. That is the implied decimal convention. If your bank uses it, read implied decimal amounts before you build the file.
Date. Your bank's spec expects one specific date format, often MM/DD/YYYY or YYYYMMDD. If the dates in your export do not match exactly, the file can be rejected or, worse, silently misread. Set the issue date column to match the bank's format first.
Step 5: Convert the export with PositivePayMaker
Once you have a clean export with check numbers, amounts, dates, and payees, you reshape it into your bank's exact layout. Every bank defines its own fixed-width or delimited format, and the field positions are account-specific, so there is no single universal layout. Building this by hand is slow and error-prone.
PositivePayMaker does the conversion in your browser. Upload the Yardi export, map the columns for check number, amount, issue date, and payee, pick your bank's layout, and download a file ready for your bank's portal. It runs entirely client-side, so your check data never leaves your browser. It ships with built-in bank layouts including Chase and Huntington, plus a custom format builder for when your bank is not on the list. To understand the field layout, the positive pay file format guide explains every field.
Validate the first file with your bank
Treat the first file as a test. Generate it, run it through the file validator to catch structural problems, then send it to your bank and confirm the check numbers and amounts match before you rely on it. A field that is off by one position can reject the whole batch. Verify once, and the rest become routine. Because Yardi is used heavily in property management, the requirements specific to that field are covered in positive pay for property management.