10 Manual Banking Tasks You Can Stop Doing: A Checklist for Finance Teams

Payment Automation

10 Manual Banking Tasks You Can Stop Doing: A Checklist for Finance Teams

Look at the tabs a finance team keeps open and you will often find a bank portal, a spreadsheet, and the accounting system, with a person carrying numbers between them. Each task is only a few minutes of retyping, checking, or matching, but they repeat.

This guide is a checklist of ten of them. For each task, it shows what the manual version looks like, what replaces it with TIB Finance, and what stays with your team. It is written for finance, accounts payable (AP), and accounts receivable (AR) managers, controllers, and owners of Canadian businesses who work largely from bank portals and spreadsheets.

How to use this checklist: read through the ten tasks and tick the ones your team still does by hand. Then start with the one that takes the most time. You do not need to change everything at once, and the last section explains where to start.

Paying Suppliers: Three Tasks to Stop Doing

These three sit between an approved bill and a paid supplier. Supplier payments with TIB Finance run by EFT (electronic funds transfer), from your bank account to the supplier's bank account. Behind the scenes, each supplier payment is set up as a collection initiated on the supplier's behalf; the end result is the same. Our guide to ACH and EFT payments explains the rail.

1. Retyping approved bills into a bank portal

By hand today: an approved bill is opened, the supplier, the amount, and the invoice number are typed into the bank portal, and then the bill is marked as paid in the accounting system.

With TIB Finance: you create the payment with the amount and the invoice details, or, once your accounting system is connected through the API, it sends the instruction. TIB Finance carries it out, so the same amount is not typed into a second screen.

Stays with your team: your accounting system still decides which bills are approved, what is paid, to whom, and when. See also automating accounts payable.

2. Collecting and retyping supplier banking details by email

By hand today: banking details arrive by email or on a form, someone types them into the bank portal or the vendor record, and a transposed digit may only show up days later as a returned payment.

With TIB Finance: you add the supplier with just a name and an email address. The supplier receives an email with a link to TIB Finance's secure page and enters their own bank account details, the first time only. A read-only TIB Finance account is also created for the supplier, so they can follow the payment's status in the portal, and they can optionally complete onboarding to get a full account.

Stays with your team: your own process for confirming a new supplier or a change of banking details still applies. This changes who types the numbers, not who is responsible for them.

3. Writing and mailing cheques

By hand today: a cheque is written, signed, and mailed, and later it has to be cleared and matched against the bank statement.

With TIB Finance: suppliers are paid by EFT, from bank account to bank account. For payments made this way, there is no cheque to print, sign, or mail, and each payment has a status you can follow.

Stays with your team: deciding who is paid and when, and following up with a supplier when a payment does not go through.

Getting Paid and Paying Back: Two Tasks to Stop Doing

4. Answering calls and emails about how to pay an invoice

By hand today: an invoice goes out as a PDF with no way to pay it. The customer calls for bank details or says a cheque is on its way, and someone follows up.

With TIB Finance: a payment link can be generated already tied to the invoice. TIB Finance can email the link to the customer, or return it to your software so you can send it with the invoice. For customers who pay on a schedule, pre-authorized debit (PAD) lets them authorize once, and later collections run on the EFT rail without a new request each time. A payer who prefers Interac e-Transfer can receive a request and approve it in their own online banking. See also automating accounts receivable.

Stays with your team: deciding whom to contact about invoices that are past due and what to do next. For PAD collections, a valid authorization must stay on file.

5. Issuing refunds from the bank portal

By hand today: a refund request is found in an email or in the accounting system, the customer's details are retyped into the bank portal, and someone later notes it against the original sale.

With TIB Finance: once your system is connected through the API, a refund can be triggered directly from the system that recorded the original sale, instead of being a separate manual step.

Stays with your team: deciding whether a refund is approved, and for how much.

Knowing What Happened: Two Tasks to Stop Doing

6. Logging in to the bank portal to see whether a payment went through

By hand today: someone signs in, scrolls through the transactions looking for the payment, or waits for the statement to arrive.

With TIB Finance: each payment has its own status, such as pending, paid, failed, or returned, which you can see in the TIB Finance portal. The same status is passed on through the API and by webhook when the bank reports it, and transactions and their statuses are available in reports. Our guide to webhook events explains how those notifications are delivered.

Stays with your team: a bank payment can stay pending until the bank reports a result, so the invoice or bill should stay open until the status says paid, and a bank return can still be reported later.

7. Finding out about returned payments days later

By hand today: a return is discovered days later, when a customer calls, a supplier asks, or the statement is reviewed, and then it has to be traced back to the right invoice.

With TIB Finance: the payment's status says so, as failed or returned, and the invoice or bill can stay open. A bank return can be reported several days after the payment was created, so you see it in the status once the bank reports it.

Stays with your team: what happens next is a decision for your team: contact the customer or the supplier, send a new payment link, confirm banking details, or collect another way. TIB Finance does not automatically retry failed payments, so a new attempt is a decision someone makes.

Keeping the Books in Step: Three Tasks to Stop Doing

8. Retyping customer payments into the accounting system

By hand today: each payment is typed in against a customer, and someone works out which invoice or invoices it covers.

With TIB Finance: a system connected through TIB Finance's API and webhooks can receive each payment's status and record the payment against the invoice it was created for. A payment made through a payment link generated already tied to an invoice is matched to that invoice automatically.

Stays with your team: whether a person reviews each payment before it is posted is decided on your side, in how the integration is built. Without a connection, transactions and their statuses are available in reports, and someone enters them.

9. Matching bank deposits to invoices in a spreadsheet at month end

By hand today: at month end, the bank lines go in one column, the invoices in another, and someone matches them by amount and hopes nothing is off.

With TIB Finance: payments made through a link tied to an invoice carry that invoice with them, so they can be matched to it from the start. For the rest, reports of transactions and statuses give your team something to reconcile against, so month end can become more of a review of exceptions than a matching exercise.

Stays with your team: payments that arrive outside this path, such as a cheque or a transfer with no reference, go through your usual process, and your team still does the reconciliation and the close.

10. Re-keying the same transaction in two systems

By hand today: a sale or a bill is entered in the accounting system, then again in the bank portal, and sometimes a third time in a spreadsheet.

With TIB Finance: TIB Finance can connect to accounting and ERP systems through its API and webhooks. The payment instruction goes out from the system where the transaction is recorded, and the status comes back to it. The connection is set up around your systems and process, and direct integrations with specific platforms are also possible. Developers can start with the payment API integration guide.

Stays with your team: deciding which reference travels with each payment, and who builds and maintains the connection.

What Does Not Change

Automating these tasks moves work. It does not move responsibility. Three things stay as they are:

• Your bank accounts stay yours. Bank payments run from one bank account to another, and TIB Finance does not replace the accounts you hold at your bank.
• Approval and accounting stay in your accounting system. QuickBooks, Sage, SAP Business One, Dynamics 365, and NetSuite remain the systems where bills and invoices are approved and recorded. TIB Finance does not do accounting or run approval workflows. It carries out the payment and reports the result.
• Your team makes the decisions. Who is paid, who is refunded, and what happens after a returned payment remain decisions for people. Our guide to choosing the right payment methods for B2B transactions shows how methods can run side by side.

Where to Start

Pick one task, not ten. Choose the one that takes the most time, or the one most likely to go wrong, such as banking details retyped by hand. Set it up, see how it behaves over a few cycles, and then move on to the next. For the wider picture, our guide to automating the full payment cycle covers collections and payouts together.

Four pieces of TIB Finance, a Canadian payment automation platform, sit behind this checklist:

If several boxes on this list are ticked, contact our team to see how TIB Finance fits the way you collect, pay, and reconcile today.

Common Questions

Which manual banking tasks can payment automation replace?

Common ones are retyping approved bills into a bank portal, collecting supplier banking details by email, writing cheques, chasing customers for payment, issuing refunds by hand, checking a bank portal for payment status, retyping payments into the accounting system, matching deposits to invoices in a spreadsheet, and entering the same transaction in two systems.

Do I still need my bank accounts?

Yes. Your bank accounts stay yours. Bank payments run from one bank account to another, and TIB Finance does not replace the accounts you hold at your bank.

Can I stop collecting supplier banking details myself?

Yes. You create the supplier with just a name and an email address, and the supplier receives an email with a link to TIB Finance's secure page, where they enter their own bank account details. They only have to do this the first time, not for later payments.

How do I know whether a payment went through without opening the bank portal?

Each payment has a status, such as pending, paid, failed, or returned. You can see it in the TIB Finance portal, and it is passed on through the API and by webhook when the bank reports it. Transactions and their statuses are also available in reports.

What happens when a payment is returned?

The status says so, and the invoice or bill can stay open. A bank return can be reported several days after the payment was created. TIB Finance does not automatically retry failed payments, so what happens next is up to your team.

Can customer payments be matched to invoices automatically?

Yes, when the payment is made through a payment link generated already tied to an invoice. A connected accounting system can use each payment's status to record it against that invoice. Payments that arrive outside this path, such as a cheque, go through your usual process.

Do I need to replace QuickBooks, Sage, or SAP?

No. QuickBooks, Sage, SAP Business One, Dynamics 365, and NetSuite stay the systems where bills and invoices are approved and recorded. TIB Finance carries out the payment and reports the result, and it can connect to accounting and ERP systems through its API and webhooks.

Where should we start?

Pick the one task that takes your team the most time, or the one most likely to go wrong, and set that one up first. You do not need to change everything at once.