There are some confusions around using Sage 50 EFT Direct program example some new users might enter banking information in Sage 50 but nothing in EFT itself. That confusion is understandable, one of the first thing we can see in Sage 50 employee’, vendor’ or customer’ record is Direct Deposit or Pre-authorized debit tab. So one might be inclined to think that the banking information from those tabs is transferred in EFT Direct program, that is not the case.

EFT is a standalone application with its own database, but it cannot work without Sage 50 database. Basically EFT will scan Sage 50 data file to find information like: transaction date and amount, bank account… in order to generate the file that will be sent to the financial institution. So EFT is an add-on program to Sage 50 Canada that allows to process direct deposits and pre-authorized debit. When using EFT program the user upload the file to their financial institution website. Confusion comes in as Sage 50 has a second separate way of processing direct deposit. This second way is Beanstream (the third party company that process the direct deposit for a subscription fee). See here a previous blog post about Beanstream.

EFT has been built around Microsoft Access technology, that is to say that EFT direct database: names, dates, numbers and banking information are in Microsoft Access format. Because it has its own database EFT can import names (vendors, customers, employees) from Sage 50. But unfortunately it cannot import (for now) banking information. There is a one-way synchronization for imported names in EFT. Example a vendor name has been changed in Sage 50, the next time EFT is open it will update that vendor name only. There is no synchronization for the vendor banking information; any change on the banking information has to be done in EFT program itself.

Sage 50 and EFT Direct work in tandem, but I have to say that EFT cannot work without a valid Sage 50 data. Example if the location or name of Sage 50 file changes then the new location or new name has to be updated into EFT Direct otherwise the two programs won’t be the same page! As a result EFT won’t find the information necessary to generate a deposit file.

Another source of confusion comes in network situations. EFT Direct is neither network based nor a multi-user program. Sage has not tested EFT in networks. The recommended setup is to install EFT direct locally on a workstation or server and use it locally on that computer. Furthermore it has to be used by one user only as multi-user might create issues for example with the sequence number for the generation file.

Hope this helps know better EFT and clears up some confusions. Please free let me know if you have questions or suggestions

Thanks