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Stop Payments

Introduction​

If a customer expects a payment to come in which they would like to prevent from being processed, you can submit a stop payment on their behalf using the Stop Payment API. Stop Payments are available for Received ACH debit Payments and Check Payments.

Unit will then screen all check payments and received debit ACH for that customer, and if matched against the information provided, the payment will be returned with “Stop Payment” as the reason.

Use Cases​

Sometimes customers will need to cancel a check payment they issued or an ACH payment they authorized. Common examples can include:

  • Cancelled Services or Orders: If a customer cancels a service or an order but the payment was already scheduled, an ACH stop payment can prevent the transaction from going through.
  • Subscription or Recurring Payments: If a customer wants to cancel a subscription or recurring payment and the service provider does not halt the payments on their end in time, they can issue a stop payment order to block future debits.
  • Disputes with Merchants or Service Providers: If there is a dispute with a merchant or service provider over the quality of goods or services received and you cannot resolve the issue, stopping the payment might be a last resort to avoid losing money.
  • Fraud Prevention: In cases where fraudulent activity on an account is suspected or if there's been a breach of your financial information, you can use stop payments to protect funds from unauthorized ACH debits.
  • Compromised Check Payment: if a customer issued a check that was lost, stolen, or issued in error), you can request a stop payment.
  • Limiting an authorization to debit: If you have given authorization for debits from your account but only up to a specific amount, and you want to ensure that any debit requests exceeding that authorized amount are stopped, you can use an ACH stop payment.This precaution is especially useful in agreements where the amount might vary or if there's a chance of billing errors, ensuring that only the amounts you've approved are debited from your account. This precaution is especially useful in agreements where the amount might vary or if there's a chance of billing errors, ensuring that only the amounts you've approved are debited from your account.

Expiration​

If expirationDate is not provided upon creation, a check stop instruction will be valid for a one year period, and can be applied multiple times if the check happens to be deposited multiple times.

A multi-use ACH stop payment will become inactive only if you have specified an expiration date which has passed, or if it is disabled.

When an ACH stop payment isMultiUse is set to false, it will remain in place until the earlier of the return of an ACH payment, its expiration date (if provided), or when it is disabled - whichever occurs first.

A stop payment's expiration date can be modified as long as the stop payment is active and only to a future date.

ACH Stop Payments​

When creating an ACH stop payment, the customer may choose to specify minAmount, one or more originatorName or both. If both are provided, we will only stop payments that match both values.

info

If more than one stop payment order matches a received payment's details, only one of them will be matched with the payment, and the other will remain active.

originatorName is the name of the originator of the ACH debit. Our name matching algorithm will ignore:

  • Punctuation
  • Leading and trailing spaces
  • Casing.
  • Characters with accent marks will be matched with their equivalent non-accented characters.

Other than for the exceptions mentioned here, we will only stop payments if their originatorName matches the name given in the stop payment order. For example, a stop payment order made to stop payments made by "Acme Inc" will stop payments received from:

  • "Acme inc"

  • "Acme Inc."

  • "Acme Inc "

    But not:

  • "Acme Incorporated" If you are uncertain as to how the originator name will appear on the payment, you may specify multiple originatorNames.

Stopping All Received ACH Payments​

You must specify at least a originatorName or a minAmount when creating an ACH stop payment. If you are interested in stopping all received ACH debits to an account, you may create a stop payment where the originatorName is left blank and minAmount is set to 0. If this stop payment is single-use it will stop the first ACH debit received in the account and then become inactive. If it is multi-use, it will stop all recevied ACH debit payments received in the account until it is disabled or expires.