We will be going live with image check presentment with the Fed.
What does that mean?
Well, on Friday, after my staff processed and balanced all of the checks, deposits, loan payments, etc., they had to prepare a cash letter and encode all of the amounts on the outbound checks. A cash letter is a bank's deposit to the Fed. We get credit for having deposited all of the foreign checks. We prepared 4 cash letters and spent about 4 hours doing so.
On Monday, it'll take about 40 minutes for us to format the checks for transmission to the Fed and to complete the transmission.
I'm hoping that everything goes as smoothly as it did during testing. One of my employees will become a father again on Tuesday and so we know we'll be short staffed for the rest of the week, so that extra time saved will be valuable to us.
Last week, we automated the printing of all of the forms that he used to do manually with a line-writer printer. Now, they'll be done on a laser printer and will be waiting when everyone gets to work. We also took away another 1.5 hours of work that was spent in sorting all of the on-us checks into piles of exceptions (NSF, UCF, stop payment, etc.) We automated that last week and are now printing substitute documents to return to the Fed.
This is the most fun thing I've done at the bank since February 2005 when we installed the 5th image processing system in PA.
The ultimate goal of Check 21 (the act that allows us to transmit images and data to/from the Fed) is to reduce float. Basically, when most banks are not processing paper, a $1 million check that you deposit on the east coast, from a west coast bank at 9:00 a.m. EST can be cleared by 1:00 p.m. EST.
Yes, I'm a computer nerd and find automation exciting! My staff is looking forward to changing its hours so it can leave most nights by 6:00 instead of 7:00.
What does that mean?
Well, on Friday, after my staff processed and balanced all of the checks, deposits, loan payments, etc., they had to prepare a cash letter and encode all of the amounts on the outbound checks. A cash letter is a bank's deposit to the Fed. We get credit for having deposited all of the foreign checks. We prepared 4 cash letters and spent about 4 hours doing so.
On Monday, it'll take about 40 minutes for us to format the checks for transmission to the Fed and to complete the transmission.
I'm hoping that everything goes as smoothly as it did during testing. One of my employees will become a father again on Tuesday and so we know we'll be short staffed for the rest of the week, so that extra time saved will be valuable to us.
Last week, we automated the printing of all of the forms that he used to do manually with a line-writer printer. Now, they'll be done on a laser printer and will be waiting when everyone gets to work. We also took away another 1.5 hours of work that was spent in sorting all of the on-us checks into piles of exceptions (NSF, UCF, stop payment, etc.) We automated that last week and are now printing substitute documents to return to the Fed.
This is the most fun thing I've done at the bank since February 2005 when we installed the 5th image processing system in PA.
The ultimate goal of Check 21 (the act that allows us to transmit images and data to/from the Fed) is to reduce float. Basically, when most banks are not processing paper, a $1 million check that you deposit on the east coast, from a west coast bank at 9:00 a.m. EST can be cleared by 1:00 p.m. EST.
Yes, I'm a computer nerd and find automation exciting! My staff is looking forward to changing its hours so it can leave most nights by 6:00 instead of 7:00.
