When setting up direct credits with your bank for the first time, some banks might ask you to create a test file, also known as a penny test file.

Your bank will usually ask you to send an amount, most commonly being a cent, to the bank using a minimum of one employee's payslip transaction. While the amounts may vary from bank to bank, the method remains the same. Below you will find a step by step process on how to generate the file.

To create your test file you will need to first ensure that you have setup your company bank account as well as your employees for Direct Credit. If you haven't done this already, refer to the articles below.

The bank may ask you to input a specific amount of net for your employees. For this example we will send one cent to the bank using a minimum of one employee's payslip transaction.
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First you will need to open an uncalculated payroll, your next payroll (if not calculated yet) would do.

Calculate one or more employees (depending how many the bank requested). Their normal salary will be calculated. What we will be doing next is nullifying the net to 0. You can do this by inputting the amount of hours on the payslip (173.33 in this case) at a 0 rate in the basic hour tab, and ensuring that regular basic hrs. is set to replace.

If the employee has any recurring pay items coming up, be sure to go to the pay item tab and set them all to 0.

You should now be left with a 0 net payslip which is calculated. All we need to do now is to add one hour at 0.01 cent rate. Click the basic hour tab and press + and input 1 hour at 0.01 rate with regular basic hrs set to add this time. If your bank has asked for a different amount, input whatever the amount is as the rate for that one hour.
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You should now have an employee payslip with the amount requested by the bank

To generate the test file requested by the bank on Indigo, generate the direct credit file as you normally would. The only difference will be that you are generating a file with the amount requested by the bank. You can find a step by step guide on how to generate the direct credit file in the article below.

Once you have generated the file with the amount requested, grab it from your downloads folder and send it to your bank.