Every mid-month and end-month I encounter a very frustrating issue involving BPay batch payments. Most strata invoices and some other creditors have very long BPay reference numbers. DEFT Payment Systems, for example, have 16 digit reference numbers.

The issue is this: When PT generates the BPay batch file for uploading, PT compresses the long reference numbers when generating the Excel spreadsheet which is then imported to our bank trust account. A long reference number gets converted to 85730570+16, for example. The bank trust account rejects these compressed reference numbers due to an invalid character (the '+' symbol).

I have to go back and open the excel spreadsheet and manually edit the long reference numbers and format the excel cell so that what I type is what is uploaded. This takes up around 70% of the entire mid/end month process and is very VERY frustrating.

Surely there is a way for the parameters of reference number generation/conversion to excel to be expanded to take long reference numbers into account.

I spoke to our IT consultant and he said that other offices have exactly the same issue with PT.