An home-grown, open-source NACHA library
NACHA stands for National Automated Clearing House Association. NACHA is an organization that establishes the standards and rules followed by financial institutions for transferring payments.
nacho-nacha empowers small (and large) businesses and non-profit organizations to skip the middle man of the banking industry: the ACH service provider. The ACH companies out there earn money for every ACH (digital banking) transaction they perform on behalf of your business. These transactions are tracked using a complex protocol stored in text files, often referred to as "NACHA files."
It's worth $$ to know that these ACH houses don't do anything special---they simply know how to present your data to the Federal Reserve.
That's right. If you own a business that sends or receives digital checks, you're literally paying someone else to reorganize your hard-earned data, wrap it in a pretty box called a NACHA file, and mail it to the Fed (in a manner of speaking).
Most businesses work with ACH companies because the alternative is too expensive: figuring out how to create and read NACHA files. It takes a great deal of trial-and-error and insider knowledge. It took a team of brilliant software engineers and myself nearly three months to get it right.
But what if you didn't have to figure it out? What if you could hand your developers a single tool that would enable them to quickly and easily write very simple code with zero knowledge of NACHA protocols? What if this tool was free?
nacho-nacha aims to do just that. With nacho-nacha I believe we can drastically reduce operating costs, increase profit margins, and stick it to The Man. I believe we can revolutionize the banking industry.
All help is welcome, although this type of project obviously requires some knowledge of NACHA protocols and the like.
If you have this knowledge and would like to contribute to this project, you're welcome to fork, branch, and submit a pull request (you know the drill).
Or you can contact me via LinkedIn.