Check fraud never went away. Someone gets hold of your account number, prints a convincing check, and cashes it before anyone notices. Positive pay is the banking industry’s answer: you send your bank a list of every check you issued — number, amount, payee — and the bank refuses to clear anything that isn’t on the list. It’s one of the cheapest fraud protections a business can buy.
Both Dynamics GP and Dynamics 365 Business Central can produce that file. Round 31 of our GP vs. BC Functionality Face-Off compares GP’s Safe Pay module with Business Central’s positive pay export — and, as with last round’s electronic vendor payments, the difference is mostly in how much setup lands on your desk.
How you do it in Dynamics GP
GP’s positive pay feature is called Safe Pay, and it lives under Financial >> Routines >> Safe Pay.
Install the module. Safe Pay ships with GP, but it isn’t always installed. If the windows are missing, someone runs the GP installation wizard on each machine, adds the Safe Pay feature, and confirms it appears in the Financial routines. A small step, but it means a visit from IT before you start.
Build the format in the Configurator. Your bank sends a file specification — fixed width or delimited, header records, detail records, trailer records. In the Safe Pay Configurator window, you recreate that spec by hand: add a line for each record type, set the field counts, then map each output field to a GP field with the right length, justification, and filler characters. Partners typically recommend building it in a test company first, having the bank validate a sample file, and then exporting the format and importing it into your live company. It’s a real configuration project, and it’s all on you to match the bank’s document exactly.
Link the plumbing. In the Upload Maintenance window, you create a Bank Upload ID, attach a Bank ID, and add each checkbook that should feed the file. Miss that link and your checks simply don’t show up — in fact, Microsoft’s troubleshooting guide lists seven different reasons checks may fail to load into the upload window, from unlinked checkbooks to cutoff-date ranges to a Configurator setting that quietly omits checks starting with letters.
Generate and upload. After each check run, you open the Safe Pay Transactions Upload window, confirm the date range, and generate the file. GP writes it to the folder path from setup, and per Microsoft’s Safe Pay documentation, you then upload it through your bank’s portal, come back to GP, and key in the bank’s confirmation number to mark the upload successful. Need the same file again? There’s a Transaction History window with a regenerate routine.
How you do it in Business Central
Business Central bakes positive pay into the bank account itself.
Pick the format. Open the bank account card and set one field: Positive Pay Export Format. Microsoft’s positive pay guide notes that BC comes preconfigured with formats for Bank of America and City Bank. If your bank wants something different, you build it with a Data Exchange Definition — a no-code page where you define the header, detail, and footer lines and their columns once, without touching the development environment. It’s the same framework BC uses for payment exports and bank statement imports, so if you’ve configured one, the next feels familiar.
Export after a check run. From the bank account, choose the Positive Pay Export action. The page shows every payment made since your last upload, you set a cutoff date, choose Export, and save the file. Upload it to your bank’s site, then record the confirmation number on the Positive Pay Entries page — which also keeps counts and totals of checks and voids in each file, with drill-down to the exact payment lines through Positive Pay Entry Details.
Re-export in one click. Because BC stores the exported file with each entry, re-sending a file is a single Reexport action on the Positive Pay Entries page — no regeneration routine, no hunting for folder paths.
Voided checks ride along automatically, so the bank knows to reject a check you’ve cancelled — a detail fraudsters love to exploit.
Side by side
| Dynamics GP (Safe Pay) | Business Central | |
|---|---|---|
| Getting the feature | Install the Safe Pay module via the GP setup wizard | Built in — nothing to install |
| Bank file format | Build record-by-record in the Configurator, validate with the bank | Bank of America and City Bank preconfigured; others via a Data Exchange Definition |
| Connecting accounts | Bank Upload ID linked to checkbooks in Upload Maintenance | One format field on the bank account card |
| Creating the file | Safe Pay Transactions Upload window, file written to a folder path | Positive Pay Export action with a cutoff date |
| Confirmation tracking | Key the bank’s confirmation number into the upload window | Confirmation number field on Positive Pay Entries |
| Re-sending a file | Regenerate from Transaction History | Reexport action — the file is stored with the entry |
| When checks go missing | Seven documented causes to troubleshoot | Page shows all payments since last upload |
Why BC comes out ahead
GP’s Safe Pay does the job, and plenty of Aisling clients run it every week. But look at where the effort sits: installing a module, rebuilding your bank’s file spec field by field, linking checkbooks to upload IDs, and troubleshooting the handful of quiet settings that can keep a check out of the file. Positive pay is supposed to reduce risk — the setup shouldn’t add any.
Business Central turns the same protection into one field on the bank account card and one action after each check run. The formats live in a framework Microsoft maintains, the exported files are stored for instant re-export, and voids flow through on their own. Add it to the pattern we’ve traced through paying vendors and EFT: BC keeps the protection and drops the project.
Protect your checks without the project
If you’ve been meaning to turn on positive pay but the Safe Pay Configurator keeps sliding down the list — or you’re already fighting it — we can help. Aisling Dynamics sets up banking and fraud controls as part of every Business Central implementation. See our services or contact us at (251) 293-0555.
Next up in the Face-Off: multicurrency — GP’s Multicurrency Management vs. BC’s currencies with automatic exchange rate updates.