How to accept e-Transfer payments as a business

Here's how to accept e-Transfer payments as a business: open online banking on a Canadian business account at a participating bank or credit union, register an email address or mobile number for Autodeposit, and give customers that address along with an invoice number to quote. Money sent to that address goes straight into your account, with no security question to answer. Your bank sets the limits and any fees, so check both before you rely on e-Transfer for large invoices.

One thing up front: we don't process e-Transfers, and no card processor does. An Interac e-Transfer moves money from your customer's bank account to yours, through the two financial institutions. Interac Debit at your checkout is a separate service that does run through a processor, and our guide to what Interac is explains how the two differ. This guide covers the e-Transfer side: setup, security questions, limits, fees, reconciliation, and the cases where a card payment does the job better.

What do you need to accept e-Transfer payments?

Very little. Interac's business FAQ says you can use Interac e-Transfer for business invoicing and payments if you bank with a participating bank or credit union, and that you need a Canadian online bank account and an email address or mobile phone number.

That gets you basic receiving. Many banks also offer Interac e-Transfer for Business on business accounts, which adds features built for companies:

• Business Request Money, for sending payment requests to customers
• bulk receivables, for sending requests to many customers at once
• bulk payables, for sending payments to many suppliers or staff in a single step
• transactions of up to $25,000, depending on your financial institution and account type
• up to 10,000 payments sent at a time

Keep business payments out of your personal account, even if a customer offers to send there. Mixing the two makes bookkeeping and tax time harder, and the business features only come with business accounts. Ask your bank which e-Transfer features your account includes and what each one costs.

How do you set up Autodeposit for your business?

Autodeposit is the single most useful setting for a business. Interac's setup guide describes the steps:

1. Sign in to your business online or mobile banking.
2. Go to your Interac e-Transfer profile settings.
3. Add the email address or mobile number you want to use for Autodeposit.
4. Choose the account the money should go into.
5. Confirm the registration when your bank asks you to verify it.

From then on, money sent to that address goes straight into the account you picked, without a security question. Interac describes Autodeposit as a way to pre-authenticate an email address or phone number to a specific bank account, which is why the question isn't needed.

A few choices make it work better:

• Register an address the business controls, such as payments@ your domain, not an employee's personal email. People leave; the address should stay.
• Print that address on every invoice, quote, and receipt, so customers never guess.
• If you have more than one business account, decide which one receives e-Transfers and stick to it.

How do e-Transfer security questions work?

Without Autodeposit, every transfer arrives with a security question. The sender writes the question and answer when they send the money, and you have to answer it correctly to deposit. Interac's e-Transfer FAQ says the question is there so only the intended recipient can collect the transfer, and that the answer should never be sent by email or text message.

For a business, security questions cause friction. Customers forget the answer they used, type it into the message field (which defeats the point), or call your office to ask what to put. Autodeposit removes all of that.

Don't solve the problem by printing one standard answer on your invoices. Anyone who sees an invoice would then know how to collect a transfer meant for you. If you can't use Autodeposit yet, ask each customer to call or text you the answer separately, never in the transfer's own message.

How much can customers send by e-Transfer?

Limits are set by each bank or credit union, and the customer's limit matters as much as yours. Interac says business transactions can be up to $25,000, depending on your financial institution and account type. Your customer's own bank sets how much they can send, and that may be well below the size of your invoice.

Ask before you send a large invoice, and agree on a plan if the amount is over their limit: several transfers over a few days, a card payment, or another kind of bank transfer. Don't find out on the due date.

Three other timing rules are worth knowing:

• Unclaimed transfers expire. Interac's FAQ says that if a transfer isn't picked up within 30 days, the sender is told it has expired and how to reclaim the money. With Autodeposit, this rarely comes up.
• The sender can cancel before you deposit. Interac's terms of use say that until you've tried to deposit a transfer, or it has been deposited automatically, the sender may cancel it.
• After deposit, it's done. Interac's FAQ says there's no way to reverse a transfer once it has been deposited; the sender has to make arrangements with the recipient directly.

That last point is a real advantage. A card payment can come back as a chargeback months later. A deposited e-Transfer can't be pulled back through Interac.

What does it cost to accept e-Transfer?

Your bank decides. Some business account plans include a set number of e-Transfers, some charge per transfer, and some charge separately for features like Request Money. There's no interchange, because an e-Transfer isn't a card payment. Ask your bank for the receiving fee, the Request Money fee, and the monthly cost of e-Transfer for Business, in writing.

Here's how that compares with taking the same $1,500 invoice by card:

The debit figure comes from Interac, and the credit rates come from Visa's published Canadian interchange schedule. On cost alone, e-Transfer and Interac Debit both beat credit by a wide margin. Cost isn't the only thing that matters, though.

A worked example

Say a landscaping company in Kitchener bills 60 residential clients $180 a month, or $10,800 in total. If every client paid online with a Mastercard World credit card at Mastercard's published digital commerce rate of 1.90%, interchange would be $205.20 a month before processor fees. By e-Transfer, it's whatever the bank charges.

But e-Transfer has a hidden cost: someone has to send 60 requests, match 60 deposits, and chase the clients who forget. Cards on file with recurring billing collect automatically. The right answer depends on whether $205 a month is worth more than the hours your office spends chasing payments.

How do you reconcile e-Transfer payments?

This is the part that gets messy. A deposit shows up with a sender's name that doesn't match the customer's company and no invoice number, and someone spends twenty minutes working out who paid.

Interac's tools help if you use them. Business Request Money lets you collect payments from your website, app, QR code, or directly within invoices. And Interac says e-Transfer for Business is ISO 20022 compliant, so remittance data such as invoice numbers and customer numbers can travel with a payment, which helps when you use ERP or accounting software.

A routine that works:

1. Send a Request Money for each invoice, with the invoice number in the message, instead of waiting for customers to send on their own.
2. Ask customers who do send on their own to put the invoice number in the message.
3. Receive every e-Transfer into one account.
4. Match deposits to invoices daily, by amount, sender name, and message.
5. Follow up on partial or unexplained payments the same week.
6. Record the date the money was deposited, not the date of the email.

Watch for fake notifications

Interac warns that fake money transfer emails can be part of a phishing scam. Its advice on email fraud is to be suspicious of a notification you weren't expecting, contact the sender to confirm, and forward it to phishing@interac.ca if you can't. For a business, the rule is simpler still: before you release goods or start work, confirm the money is in your account by signing in to your banking directly. Never trust the email alone.

When are cards better than e-Transfer?

E-Transfer is excellent for invoices, deposits, and payments from other businesses. It's awkward at a counter and on recurring bills. Here's where we'd use each:

Our POS terminals take Interac, Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, and our virtual terminal sends card invoices and payment links and runs recurring billing. You can run both side by side: e-Transfer for invoices, and card payment processing for everything else.

If card fees are the reason you push everything to e-Transfer, look at the actual numbers first. Debit at a terminal costs very little, and outside Quebec you can add a capped surcharge to credit card payments under Visa's and Mastercard's rules. Our guide to credit card surcharges in Canada covers the limits, and our Quebec page explains why card fees aren't allowed there.

Common e-Transfer mistakes

• Taking business payments into a personal account.
• Printing one security answer on every invoice.
• Releasing goods because of an email notification, without checking the bank account.
• Accepting transfers with no invoice number and sorting it out later.
• Assuming customers can send any amount, then learning about their limit on the due date.
• Using e-Transfer for counter sales, where a tap on a terminal is faster for everyone.
• Registering an employee's personal email for Autodeposit.

Next step

If e-Transfers are carrying most of your invoices because card fees worry you, it's worth checking what cards would really cost. Send us a recent statement for a free statement review, and we'll show your debit and credit costs line by line. Whether you're in British Columbia or anywhere else in Canada, you can also book a consultation to set up card payments that sit alongside e-Transfer. For the debit side, start with our guide to Visa Debit in Canada.