The situation
The client banks with CIBC. Twice a week, the AP clerk was exporting transaction history from CIBC’s portal, importing into NetSuite, and matching transactions to bills line by line. Payment runs were even worse — every vendor payment required manually entering payee details into CIBC’s payment portal, with NetSuite updated afterward as a record-keeping exercise. Two failure modes followed: duplicate payments because the bank and ERP weren’t synced, and missed early-pay discounts because cycles were too slow to catch them.
The mandate
Connect NetSuite to CIBC for both directions: statements in for bank reconciliation, and payments out — both EFT and wire — generated from approved bills in NetSuite.
What we did
- Inbound — daily statement import. Configured a secure daily pull of CIBC transaction data into NetSuite. Transactions land as bank statement records and auto-match to NetSuite bills and deposits using payment reference, amount, and date.
- Auto-match rules. Built matching logic tuned to the client’s payment patterns — exact match where possible, fuzzy match with a confirmation queue where not. AP clerks now only see what didn’t match instead of working through every transaction.
- Outbound — EFT file generation. Set up NetSuite’s EFT module configured to CIBC’s specific file format. Approved bills are batched, the EFT file generates inside NetSuite, uploads to the CIBC portal, and the bill status updates automatically once the bank confirms.
- Outbound — wire payment workflow. For wires — used for one-off and international payments — built a workflow that captures the right backup, routes for approval, generates the wire request from NetSuite, and logs the confirmation back against the bill.
- Controls and audit. Every step is logged. Segregation of duties enforced: the person who enters a bill is not the person who approves it, and not the person who releases the payment file.
The outcome
Bank reconciliation went from a multi-day exercise to a short review. The AP cycle from bill entry to vendor paid compressed materially. Duplicate-payment incidents went to zero. The team caught — and took — early-pay discounts that used to slip by.
Why it worked
Bank-ERP automation isn’t sexy, but it’s where finance teams spend disproportionate time. The trick is being precise about the file format, the matching rules, and the controls — and being patient enough to test the EFT file with the bank before going live.