Alaska USA's UltraBranch^® system was been recently upgraded. This upgrade provides a number of new features for UltraBranch Business Edition users, and lays the foundation for many future enhancements. These changes may alter how you perform certain activities in UltraBranch. Learn more about these changes below.

Important changes to Admin controls

The Admin features have been re-formatted. There are more options available, and the Company and User Permissions pages have been divided into categories instead of listing all options on a single page.

Important changes to Approvals

UltraBranch Business Edition offers greater control over the payment limits and approval process.

Overview of limits and approvals

• Advanced payment features (Wires, ACH, and tax payments) are configured with limits that restrict the amount that can be sent in a single transaction or over the course of a single day.
• To allow for flexibility in payments, you can enable the option to "Exceed limits with approval".
• If "Exceed limit with Approval" is not checked, you will not be able to create payments above the limit amount.
• If "Exceed limit with Approval" is checked, a user can create payments beyond the set limits, but these payments will be placed into a "Pending Approval" status and will not processed until a user with Approval authority reviews them and marks them as approved.

Limits can now be set at the individual user level

In addition to the company limits, you can more closely control your finances by setting different payment limits for individual users.

• The Primary Contact does not have individual limits, but uses the company limits instead.
• All other users may have individual limits no greater than the value of the company limit. Payments above their individual limit cannot be created, unless "Exceed limit with approval" is set, in which case the payment is created in a "Pending Approval" state.
• Users with no individual limits can create payments up to the full company limits.

Users can not approve their own "Pending Approval" payments

• In the case of single-user accounts, the only way to submit these payments is to raise your transaction limits, return to the saved payment and re-submit it. The payment will then be compared to the new limits.
• If you have multiple users with approval permissions, one of these other users may approve the transaction.

Expired payment requests are not editable

• Items left "Pending Approval" until after the effective date has passed can no longer be edited. A new payment will need to be created with a valid effective date.
• To ensure unapproved items don't expire, users with approval rights should enable "Pending Approval" alerts. To enable these alerts each Approver should log in and click the "Edit" button next to the "Alerts & Messages" title in the upper right corner of the Account Summary page.

Important changes to tax payments

The tax payment feature has upgraded to take full advantage of the ACH system in UltraBranch Business Edition.

ACH limits now apply to tax payments

• You cannot set your tax payment limits higher than your ACH limits.
• If your tax payment limits were set higher than your ACH limits prior to this upgrade, your tax payments will be limited to the lower of these limits.
• To reset your ACH and tax payment limits, select the Admin tab, then click the "Edit" button next to the "ACH Access and Limits" entry.

Tax payments are now created like ACH payments

• When you create a new tax payment, you first create a "Batch" which contains basic information such as your company name, effective payment date, and the payment source account.
• You then add one or more "Entries" to the batch. Each entry corresponds to a single type of tax payment and specifies payment amounts and options appropriate for that payment type.

Tax payments now support templates

• After you submit a tax payment batch, you have the option to save the batch as a template.
• To make a new payment based on a saved template:
  1. Load the tax payments page, then select 'New Tax Payment'
  2. Select a saved template from the "Choose Template" drop-down menu, then click the "Load Template" button.
  3. Change the batch "Effective Date", and edit the individual entries to change payment amount and Tax Period End date.
  4. Click "Submit for Payment" to schedule your new payment.