ACH (Automated Clearing House) Payments are electronic funds sent directly to a checking account. Moving money needs to be secure and precise, and this type of payment has a very strict process. For example, an entire NACHA file with transactions can be rejected for having one wrong character in file header record. Because this process is so complex, the ACH team wanted to mitigate new payers’ confusion (did they enter the SEC code properly or misname the batch ID?) and wrote two supplementary documents, for file specifications and help & support.

This help & support guide details how to upload ACH files (NACHA and CSV, respectively), which contains multiple payment transactions, through Chase. In addition to walking payers through the file upload flow with step-by-step screenshots, the guide explains how to validate, preview, and schedule files.

I strove to make an extremely technical guide as easy to read as possible. It was a standard copyediting job: I tightened sentences for clarity and succinctness, while adhering to ACH’s defined voice and tone (clear, professional, and instructive). My edits whittled it a 28 page document down to 22.

Click or tap to make the wireframe examples larger. The left screenshots are original product copy and the ones on the right contain my revisions.

• Excessively wordy with redundant phases. I cut the sentences to be shorter.

  • For example, I changed “while it doesn’t cost you anything to upload a file” to “Chase doesn’t charge additional fees.”

  • I adjusted some of the sub-header titles for brevity. For example, “Important things you should know” became “Important things to know.”

• There is a companion file specifications document to download. Since I also had to work on it, I set the naming convention (the “Chase file specs” links, as seen in “Upload ACH file” screenshot). The product owner’s draft had referred to the file specs doc with several different names.