Fewer and fewer companies pay their vendors with printed checks. Electronic payments — ACH in the United States, EFT more broadly — are cheaper, faster, and harder to steal out of a mailbox. Both Dynamics GP and Dynamics 365 Business Central can build the payment file your bank wants. The difference is how much work it takes to get there, and how many chances the process gives you to trip. Let’s look at Bank Transactions Dynamics GP vs Business Central.
Round 30 of our GP vs. BC Functionality Face-Off follows an electronic vendor payment from setup to the file your bank actually receives.
How you do it in Dynamics GP
GP’s EFT for Payables is a solid feature — once it’s running. Getting it running is a real project.
Register and build the file format. First, EFT for Payables has to be registered for your GP company. Then comes the big one: the EFT File Format window (Financial >> Cards >> EFT File Format). Your bank hands you a file specification, and you match GP’s format to it — line by line, field by field. GP ships with predefined formats like NACHA CCD and CCD+, and consultants will tell you the same thing we will: defining the correct file format is the hardest part of the whole setup.
Set up the checkbook. Next you open the Checkbook EFT Bank Maintenance window (Cards >> Financial >> Checkbook >> EFT Bank) and enter your bank’s country/region, transit routing number, account number, and the company ID your bank assigned you. Under Payables Options you pick the file format and — importantly — the folder paths where GP will drop the prenote and EFT files. Microsoft’s EFT file guidelines note the fine print: if the Payables Prenote Required box is marked, GP won’t generate a real payment file until you’ve generated a prenote test file first. And certain fields — Currency ID, Country/Region Code, Bank Country/Region — must match exactly between the checkbook and the vendor, or the file silently refuses to generate.
Set up each vendor. Vendor bank details don’t live on the vendor card itself. They attach to the remit-to address ID (Cards >> Purchasing >> Vendor >> Address >> EFT Bank). Pick the wrong address ID and the vendor drops out of the EFT file.
Run the payment. From there it’s the computer check run we walked through in Round 14 — build the batch, mark it EFT, process, print or email remittances, post — plus one more stop: Purchasing >> Transactions >> Generate EFT File. That window writes the file to the folder you configured. Then someone logs into the bank portal and uploads it by hand. Because the file sits in a folder first, GP partners commonly recommend locking that folder down so nobody can edit a payment file between generation and upload. The full EFT flow is documented in Microsoft’s Payables Management manual.
How you do it in Business Central
Business Central treats the electronic payment as the normal case, not the add-on.
Point the bank account at a format. On the bank account card, you fill in the transit number and choose a Payment Export Format — in North America, formats like US EFT CCD are built in, and SEPA Credit Transfer formats are standard elsewhere. If your bank wants something unusual, the AMC Banking 365 Fundamentals extension converts your payment export into formats required by more than 600 banks worldwide — no field-by-field format building.
Set up the vendor once. On the vendor card, set the payment method and preferred bank account, then enter the vendor’s bank account with the Use for Electronic Payments toggle switched on. Everything lives in one place, on pages you can reach from anywhere.
Let BC fill the journal. On the Payment Journal, the Suggest Vendor Payments batch job pulls in everything due, respects payment discounts and vendor priorities, and sets the Bank Payment Type to Electronic Payment. You review the lines, applied invoices and all.
Export. One action on the journal — Export — and the payment file lands in your downloads, formatted for your bank. Remittance advice can email straight to vendors from the same journal. After the bank processes the payments, you post the lines and the vendor ledger, bank ledger, and G/L all update together. No folder to guard, no separate generation window, no prenote gatekeeper hiding in a checkbook setting.
Side by side
| Dynamics GP | Business Central | |
|---|---|---|
| File format | Build or adapt in the EFT File Format window to your bank’s spec | Pick a built-in format on the bank account card; AMC Banking covers 600+ banks |
| Bank setup | Checkbook EFT Bank Maintenance window, plus prenote settings and file paths | Transit number and export format on the bank account card |
| Vendor setup | EFT bank details attached to the remit-to address ID | Vendor bank account with a Use for Electronic Payments toggle |
| Building the payment run | Computer check batch marked EFT, built and posted | Suggest Vendor Payments fills the journal automatically |
| Creating the file | Separate Generate EFT File window writes to a folder | Export action on the Payment Journal |
| Common tripwires | Prenote required, mismatched country/currency fields, file path errors | Review the journal and export |
| File security | Lock down the output folder yourself | File generated on demand, no shared drop folder |
Why BC comes out ahead
GP’s EFT works, and thousands of companies run it every week. But it carries the fingerprints of its era: a file format you construct by hand, settings split across checkbook windows and remit-to addresses, a generation step in a different module than the payment itself, and a file sitting in a folder waiting for someone to upload it. Every one of those seams is a place where a new hire gets stuck or a payment run stalls at 4:55 on a Friday.
Business Central collapses all of it into the flow you’re already in: suggest, review, export, post. The formats are maintained by Microsoft and AMC Banking rather than by you. That’s the same pattern we’ve seen all series long, from vendor setup to bank deposits: fewer windows, fewer handoffs, fewer things to remember.
Ready to retire the file format project?
If your team is still babysitting EFT folders and prenote files — or if you’ve been putting off electronic payments because the GP setup looked daunting — let’s talk. Aisling Dynamics helps companies move from GP to Business Central with payments working on day one. Explore our services or contact us at (251) 293-0555.
Next up in the Face-Off: positive pay — GP’s Safe Pay vs. Business Central’s positive pay export.