For Immediate Release
Coastal Software & Consulting, Inc. Adopts EPN STP 820
Standard For Straight-Through Processing
EZ Electronic Accounts Payable Leverages Remittance Standard to Automate and Integrate Accounts Payable Activities For Small- To Mid-Tier Firms
Vancouver, WA, Oct. 10, 2005 – Coastal Software & Consulting, Inc. announced today that it will incorporate the EPN STP 820 standard into its EZ Electronic Accounts Payable software to meet the growing demands from small- to medium-sized businesses to more efficiently manage their business-to-business accounts payable activities.
EPN STP 820 was developed by EPN, the ACH payments business of The Clearing House Payments Company L.L.C., and industry groups, software providers, banks and businesses to facilitate straight-through-processing for B-to-B electronic payments. The standard enables corporate trading partners to transmit detailed remittance information within their electronic ACH payment and allows recipients to automatically post the transactions to their internal accounting systems. The EPN STP 820 standard is supported by NACHA and the Association of Financial Professionals (AFP).
With the adoption of the EPN STP 820, EZ Electronic Accounts Payable will enable businesses to integrate electronic payments into popular accounting and financial management applications such as QuickBooks, Peachtree Accounting, and NetSuite.
The new straight-through-processing capabilities in EZ Electronic Accounts Payable will also allow firms to execute transactions from their own accounts payable applications, which can now be directly posted by the accounts receivable applications of their trading partners.
"Electronic transaction processing has created many benefits for businesses of all sizes in today’s digital economy,” said Deryk Marien, President and CEO of Coastal Software & Consulting, Inc. “Yet many companies – especially those in the middle market – have wrestled with how to reconcile electronic invoices, purchase orders and shipping notices with incoming and outgoing funds in their bank accounts. The EPN STP 820 standard is a major step forward in enabling the reconciliation of electronic payments without investing millions in professional services.”
The EZ Electronic Accounts Payable software based on the EPN STP 820 standard creates an opportunity for small- to medium-sized businesses to eliminate paper-based payments methods and realize the same cost savings and improved efficiencies that multinational organizations have traditionally enjoyed from straight-through-processing.
“We’re very pleased that Coastal Software has adopted the EPN STP 820 standard to facilitate straight-through-processing for small- to medium-sized businesses,” said Rossana Salaris, Senior Vice President of Electronic Payments Network. “The EPN STP 820 standard is helping to create a new era of B-to-B electronic payments that will deliver significant financial benefits to every industry.”
About Coastal Software & Consulting, Inc.
Based in Vancouver, WA, Coastal Software & Consulting, Inc., (www.coastalsoftware.com) provides technology solutions to electronic financial management challenges faced by organizations of all sizes. In addition to its EZ Electronic Accounts Payable offering, the company has developed and brought to market EZ-Direct Deposit® and EZ-EFT® to make payroll, billing, bill payment and accounting more simple and effective. The applications work with the most popular accounting software packages and follow the standards developed by the National Automated Clearinghouse Association (NACHA) to implement automatic bank drafts, electronic fund transfers and direct deposits, and other electronic financial transactions. For more information, visit www.coastalsoftware.com.
About EPN STP 820
EPN STP 820 was developed by the Electronic Payments Network (www.epaynetwork.com). The EPN STP 820 specifies up to 10 required data elements, with two elements – customer name and customer account number – as mandatory. When invoices are being paid, there are eight additional fields such as invoice number, gross invoice amount, and amount paid to be included with the electronic payment for each invoice being paid.
About EPN and The Clearing House Payments Company
The Electronic Payments Network, a payments business of The Clearing House Payments Company, is the only national private-sector ACH operator in the United States. Its membership consists of over 1,600 commercial banks, credit unions and savings banks. EPN processed more than 3.4 billion payments in 2004. The Clearing House Payments Company (www.theclearinghouse.org) is a private-sector, global payment systems infrastructure that clears and settles more than 20 million payments for $1.5 trillion per day. The Clearing House manages payment services that span the entire spectrum of paper, paper-to-electronic and electronic payments. For more information on The Clearing House, contact Chip Savidge, chip.savidge@theclearinghouse.org, 212.613.9896, or Greg Berardi, greg@bluemarlinpartners.com, 415.239.7826.
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