[teilo]

Ah, NACHA, oh how I hate thee.

If only NACHA files were JSON as shown in the example in the article.

I wrote a NACHA processor in MS Access many years ago for a client in the insurance industry. That thing is still being used. God, I wish it would die. Although, I'm not sure which is worse: Parsing and generating the NACHA record format, or trying to parse and generate JSON in VBA.

Why MS Access? Their entire claims processing system (which I did not write) ran on it. I only just got that damn thing migrated to an MSSQL backend. The pain.

[__s]

My previous job involved MS Access for insurance too, this in Canada. We got them to use SQL Server as a backend for most of the databases at least, so I could build infrastructure for reporting off the SQL. But all the data entry & quite a few reports were built into Access UIs. Quite a few places where we had to shunt table valued functions into Access to output into Excel

[Thorrez]

I wrote an ACH generator in Thoroughbred Script-IV[1] as an intern. It was pretty funny when my malformed ACH file generated $1 out of thin air (the bank took the dollar back a few days later). Trying to do JSON in Script-IV would have been quite a challenge.

One thing I remember was I think there were 3 different places in the ACH file to insert company name, and they were fixed length, each with a different length. I had a list of companies to support, so for each company, I carefully created 3 different abbreviated names for it, one for each length, applying more extreme abbreviation strategies for the shorter lengths.

[1] http://www.thoroughbredsoftware.com/reference/DOCUMENTATION/...

[r00fus]

The new international standard for banking is ISO 20022 [1]. Yes, it's XML, but it also doesn't have fixed width lengths, and is relatively extensible.

20022 does a lot more than just payments, too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_20022