Pay Run

What is a pay run?

A pay run groups many payments into one scheduled batch so a business can pay dozens or hundreds of suppliers or staff at once, rather than one transfer at a time. In Australia these batches are usually assembled into an ABA file and processed through direct entry. The efficiency is the point, but it also means a single flawed record in the batch can send money to the wrong account with little chance of a second look.

A concrete example: a finance team assembles the weekly pay run of approved supplier invoices, exports the ABA file, and uploads it to the bank. If one supplier’s bank details were fraudulently changed earlier in the week, that payment rides out with all the legitimate ones and settles before anyone notices.

Why it matters for Australian finance teams

Batch payments hide individual errors. Once an ABA file is submitted and direct entry settles, reversing one line is difficult, and duplicate or redirected payments are often only found at reconciliation. For teams running large, regular pay runs, the risk is that verification is skipped at the batch stage because checking each payee by hand does not scale. That gap is exactly what invoice and bank detail change fraud exploit.

How ezyshield helps

ezyshield lets you verify payees before they enter a pay run, so the batch only contains accounts whose ownership has been confirmed. It checks the person, the business via ABN and ASIC records, and bank account ownership, and re-verifies when details change rather than trusting a mid-cycle update. Every verification is logged to an append-only audit trail that is never edited or deleted. See how it works and our guide to accounts payable fraud prevention.