Importing external mandates

You can import NACH Debit mandates that were created outside of LotusPay. Doing so allows you to cancel the mandate, create payments or ACH debit transactions, and create subscriptions.

External mandates are NACH Debit mandates (either physical mandates or eMandates) that you registered with any NACH sponsor bank (with or without a service provider) outside of LotusPay. You can import external mandates into LotusPay. See Corporate Portability for more information on scenarios in which you may want to do this.

Prerequisites:

• You need to have a relevant merchant account already set up in LotusPay.

• You need to have an active matching NACH profile already set up in LotusPay.

• You should have already imported the mandates into the corresponding sponsor bank. Contact your bank relationship manager to do this, unless that banking relationship is managed via LotusPay.

Note: You cannot import mandates into a LotusPay merchant account if they were originally registered in another LotusPay merchant account. Mandates cannot be moved across merchant accounts. What you can do instead is add a NACH profile in the existing merchant account, and you can do NPCI Corporate Portability to edit the mandates if required (you can ask us to edit our mandate data after you've completed porting in NPCI).

You can do any of the following actions on the imported mandates:

• Cancel the mandate

• Create ACH debits

• Create a subscription of to automate scheduling of ACH debits

Import process

Step 1 - Prepare the data file

Extract the data from your system and prepare it in our template. Follow the instructions on the import page, which links to the API definitions for each field.

Import points to note:

1. Opening a CSV file in Microsoft Excel does not show all the issues. You must also inspect the CSV file in a text editor (e.g. Sublime for Mac, Notepad++ for Windows etc.). Look for issues in the data, for example special characters, line breaks, non-UTF8 characters etc.

2. Ensure there are no empty rows. Clearing rows in Excel is not sufficient. The rows must be deleted. Check in a text editor.

3. Commas should not be used in any cell. CSV means comma-separated values, so comma is used to separate columns i.e. it cannot be used for any other purpose.

4. Remove all special characters like period (.), comma (,), double quotes ("") etc.

5. Ensure that all mandates do not already exist in LotusPay, in any merchant account. We do not permit duplicate UMRN, hence the system will throw a 'umrn-uniqueness' error.

Step 2 - Import in the Test environment

Import the external mandates in the Test (sandbox) environment (if it's more than 1000 mandates, just import 10% of the volume as a sample). 

You can import external mandates by one of two methods:

1. API: POST Import External Mandate API.

2. Bulk file: Through the LotusPay dashboard. Go to Dashboard > Mandates > Import External. Follow the instructions on that page to download the import file template and populate it. It is a CSV file and the fields are the same as in the API. Refer to the Import External Mandate API instructions in the API Reference for the field definitions.

Step 3 - Import in the Live environment

After you've carefully checked the mandates imported into the Test environment, you may import the mandates in the Live (production) environment. Live import can be done only by emailing the file to LotusPay Support.

We won't charge for the first pilot cases and the main large batch that you want to import. We will charge an admin fee of Rs 2,000 + GST for each subsequent import.