How to create an EFT file without an ERP

You have a list of Canadian payees — employees on payroll, contractors, vendors — and your bank wants an EFT file. Not a list typed into the portal one at a time. A file. CPA 005 or one of the bank-specific variants.

You do not have NetSuite. You do not have SAP. You do not have Sage Intacct. You do not run QuickBooks Enterprise with a payroll add-on. You are not going to license one of those just to send a recurring batch of EFT payments.

But the bank’s portal is not built for batch entry — it is built to key in payments one at a time, and that fails at scale the moment you cross fifteen or twenty payees, or the moment you need to do it twice a month. You are between two tiers of tooling that were not designed for you.

EFT files in Canada are fixed-length records governed by Payments Canada’s CPA Standard 005 — the 1464-character record layout that the major banks accept. Some banks (TD, BMO, CIBC) also offer or require shorter 80-byte EFT layouts for certain product profiles. Either way, the format is unforgiving: every field has a fixed position, fixed length, fixed padding rules, and a specific data type. One off-by-one space and the bank rejects the file — often silently, sometimes with a generic error.

There is no consumer-grade Canadian equivalent of “just send the bank a CSV.” The format exists for banks to load into clearing systems, and the banks assume the file is being produced by an ERP, an accounting suite, or dedicated software. If you don’t have any of those, the path forward is not obvious — and Googling it lands you in a mix of bank documentation written for IT departments and forum threads from a decade ago.

Every Canadian business banking portal supports adding payees and sending payments individually. For five payees once a month, this is fine. For twenty-five payees on a bi-weekly payroll, it is a slow, error-prone meeting with a screen — and most operators give up on this approach somewhere between the second and third payroll cycle.

Some banks offer in-portal “batch payment” features that improve this — but the experience varies widely by bank and by your product profile, and “batch” in the portal usually means “we typed it in for you in a wizard,” not “you uploaded a file.”

Fits: very low payee counts, one-time or rare payments.
Breaks at: roughly twenty payees, or any recurring cadence where re-entry becomes the bottleneck.

Wagepoint, Payworks, ADP, Ceridian Dayforce, Plooto, Float, Venn — Canadian payroll and AP-automation services handle direct deposit and vendor EFT as a managed service. You upload payee details, the platform handles the file (or sends the payments directly through its own banking integrations), and you get reconciliation, tax filing (for payroll services), and approvals workflow.

This is the right answer if you want to outsource the function — pricing typically runs from low double-digits per active employee per month for payroll services up to per-transaction or subscription pricing for AP platforms, and you do get more than just file generation.

Fits: businesses that want managed payroll/AP, not just file generation; growing teams that need approvals and reporting.
Breaks at: budget — recurring monthly cost on every employee or transaction; loss of control over the underlying file; some platforms restrict the banks they will deposit into.

QuickBooks Online (Canada), Sage 50 Canada, Sage 300, and other Canadian accounting platforms can export EFT files for upload to the bank — sometimes natively, sometimes via a paid add-on or integration. If you already run one of these for bookkeeping, this is the lowest-friction option: the payee data is already in the system.

Fits: businesses already running a supported accounting platform for other reasons.
Breaks at: businesses that don’t have one, or that have one but its EFT export does not cover the specific bank format their profile is provisioned for (the 80-byte layouts are particularly inconsistent across accounting platforms).

Dedicated Windows desktop tools like Treasury Software’s ACH Universal generate ACH and Canadian EFT files (including CPA 005 / 1464 and 80-byte) from imported CSV/Excel data or a QuickBooks Desktop integration. ACH Universal is a Nacha Preferred Partner, has been around since the late 1990s, and has tiered subscriptions ranging from roughly $39.95 to $149.95 per month per user depending on edition and platform, plus perpetual-license options.

It is a serious tool. It also assumes you are on Windows, that you are comfortable installing and maintaining desktop software, and that the subscription cost — on a single workstation, across the year — is worth the file generation function for your volume.

Fits: Windows-based finance teams with consistent monthly EFT/ACH volume, especially with QuickBooks Desktop integration needs.
Breaks at: Mac/browser-only teams; low-frequency operators who don’t want a recurring desktop software subscription; teams that need to share access across multiple people without buying a workgroup license.

Technically possible. The CPA 005 record is 1464 characters of strictly positional ASCII; you can build it in Excel with CONCAT and REPT and a lot of patience.

Practically, this is a rejection magnet. Common failures: counting characters off by one in a padded field, using the wrong padding character (spaces vs. zeros), placing the institution number where the transit number belongs, getting the file creation number out of sequence, or writing a file trailer whose hash totals don’t match the detail records.

Fits: one-off experimentation; learning how the format works.
Does not fit: anything you intend to send to a real bank for a real payroll.

PayFile Pro is the sixth option, and the gap it fills.

The middle of that landscape — between the bank portal (not enough) and the heavyweight tools (overkill or wrong shape) — is where most Canadian SMBs sit. You have a recurring batch of payees, you don’t want to outsource the payment function, you don’t have a Windows IT environment to maintain ACH Universal in, and you don’t want a monthly subscription to a tool you’ll use twice a month.

PayFile Pro is built for that gap:

• Browser-based. No install. Works on Mac, Windows, Linux, Chromebook. Works on whatever computer you have today.
• Pay per file, not per month. Prepaid credits, no subscription, credits never expire. Generate a file when you need one; pay only for that file.
• All major Canadian formats. CPA 005 / 1464-byte for the major banks; bank-specific 80-byte layouts where required (TD, BMO, CIBC variants).
• US ACH in the same account. If you pay US contractors or have a US subsidiary, the same login generates NACHA-formatted ACH files.
• Bank-agnostic. PayFile Pro is not affiliated with any bank. It generates the file. You upload it to your bank through whatever channel (portal upload, SFTP, treasury management interface) your bank profile is provisioned for.

The honest framing: if you already run a payroll service or you’re at NetSuite/SAP scale, you don’t need this. If you’re hand-building in Excel and tired of rejections, or if ACH Universal is more software than your team can carry, this is the right shape of tool for you.

First run. Sign up. Enter your company’s banking profile — your institution and transit number, your client/originator ID assigned by the bank, the data centre code where the bank requires it (Canadian banks differ; the bank tells you which). Enter your payee list — names, transit and account numbers, amounts. Generate the file. Preview the output before downloading. Upload to your bank.

Every run after. Load the saved company profile. Update payment amounts, dates, or payee changes. Generate the new file. Download. Upload. Most users complete a recurring run in under five minutes once their profile is set up.

The CPA Standard 005 record format and the field-level mechanics are covered in detail on the CPA 005 EFT format guide if you want the format background before generating a file.