Cash Management Balance Reporting Specifications now free
The Cash Management Balance Reporting Specifications Version 2 (also known as BAI2) is now being offered free of charge for you and your customers. Download the PDF version of the specification—for FREE—now.
The Cash Management Balance Reporting Specifications were designed to be the basis for agreement between a bank and its corporate customer on how data from the bank’s account processing software would be communicated to the customer’s account processing software.
History of the Specifications
Starting in 1980, BAI led the effort, along with U.S. banks, to produce the first cash management balance reporting specifications, which became known as BAI1. Those specifications were replaced in 1987 by BAI2. The last updates to the specifications were made in 2001, when the codes for lending transactions were created.
During the last 25 years, the industry has migrated toward Internet and XML (extensible mark-up language) technologies that have enhanced bank-client communications about financial activity. (Examples include the XML cash management messaging, member-administered closed user groups (MA-CUGs) for corporate-bank communications and real-time interactive capability developed by SWIFT, the international financial industry messaging cooperative.)
Today, the Cash Management Balance Reporting Specifications are in use by thousands of banks and their corporate customers. The specifications have proved that they can accommodate virtually any requirement of a bank or corporate customer without the intervention of BAI or an industry task force. One of the reasons for that resiliency is that the standards anticipated the need to accommodate new cash management products or special bank-customer requirements. (For example, the 900-range of special transaction types is reserved for development of custom codes by banks and their customers.)
At this point, the Cash Management Balance Reporting Specifications are largely self-supporting. It is for this reason that BAI will no longer support the specifications, and offers the complete 100-page document that describes BAI2 free of charge.
The Importance of Preserving the Specifications
The specifications exist to help sender and receiver communicate. Solutions to incompatibility problems should be developed in communication and negotiation between bank and client. Banks or corporate customers that have a question about how to communicate particular data items should inspect the manual carefully, identify a potential solution, and propose it to the party at the other end of the transmission.
A standard reporting format is crucial to cost-effective balance reporting and central consolidation for large commercial customers that use multiple banks for deposit accounts in different parts of the country. Questions fielded by BAI during the last 25 years usually fell into one of two categories:
- A bank or its customer learns that the specification is required for balance reporting but does not know about the specification or does not know that a 100-page manual is available that describes the transmission format in detail.
- Over some period, the bank has deviated from the specifications, typically to solve specific business problems for individual corporate customers, leading to incompatible file formats between the bank and a new customer.
BAI strongly advises that to preserve the integrity of the standard, banks communicate custom changes – including custom transaction type codes in the 900 series — to clients in an additional document that forms an addendum to the specifications. Banks should maintain standard use everywhere possible and exhaust all other remedies before agreeing to a non-standard use.
For help on other questions that may arise, review our Frequently Asked Questions for solutions:
Other old standards
BAI also has phased out support for four other standards that are at least a decade old:
- BAI1, the Cash Management Balance Reporting Specification, Version 1, introduced in 1980 and replaced by Version 2 in 1987. Although some banks still use BAI1, BAI has not supported it formally since 1990.
- The BAI Cash Management Quality Measurements Manual. This standard was created in 1995 and has not been updated.
- Standard RFP’s for Cash Management Services. The RFP standard was created in 1997. It was updated recently by AFP, the Association for Financial Professionals, and is still available from AFP (www.afponline.org).
- The Lockbox Communications Standards for Banks, created in 1971 and never updated. This format was a precursor to the cash management balance reporting specifications but only for lockbox.
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