This function addresses the case in electronic cash transfer programs where payment account information is not known at the time of registration. Instead, the host agency receives a list of account numbers assigned to the beneficiaries from the e-payment agency after preparing and submitting KYC forms to the e-payment agency.

In this scenario, it would be time-consuming to use the mobile application to set up the payment accounts manually for the beneficiaries after receiving the account list. Data entry errors may also occur during such manual data transfer process. Since the account list will most likely be provided in electronic format by the e-payment agency, a safer and more efficient method to enter the data would be to import the list directly.

Steps to Follow

• Read through this documentation to obtain a thorough understanding of all aspects of the import process, especially the required data file format.
• Create a CSV file from the list provided by the e-payment agency. Make sure the file contains the required header row and data columns.
• If the CSV file is too big, it may be advisable to break it up into smaller files and import them one at a time. (Just remember to add the same header row to each file.)
• For each import operation, the payment agency and account type associated with the accounts being imported will have to be specified, so if multiple payment agencies and/or account types are involved, the data will have to be segregated by agency and account type into separate CSV files and the import operation will have to be repeated for each file.
• Go to the Import Payment Accounts page to import the CSV file(s).

Please note that this import function is only available to users with the administrator role.

Currently, CSV is the only input file format supported by this import operation. CSV is a rather loose standard in that many variations exist and are supported by different computer systems. In the context of importing payment accounts, the following rules should be observed:

• The CSV file must have a header row. Column names are case-sensitive and can only appear in English. See Required Columns for details on the columns that need to be provided in the input file.
• Each data row represents a payment account to be added to a household member. Rows should be delimited by newline characters.
• Columns must be separated by commas. Tabs and other delimiters such as semicolons are not supported. Values containing embedded commas need to be enclosed in double quotes.
• Columns can be arranged in any order as long as all the required columns are present. If extra columns are included in the file, they will simply be ignored.
• UTF-8 encoding (without BOM or signature) should be used for the file content when the data contains non-ASCII characters such as accented letters or foreign scripts.

Excel and UTF-8

When saving an Excel spreadsheet as a CSV file, there is no option to specify UTF-8 as the encoding, hence any non-ASCII characters will not be saved correctly in the CSV file.

The safest and easiest way to work around this issue is to use Google Sheets if a Google Drive account is available. Simply upload the Excel file to Google Drive, open it as a Google Sheet, and download it as a CSV file. Unlike Excel, Google will handle the character encoding correctly and automatically. Before the download, just ensure the correct date format has been applied to the date columns. It is also prudent to delete the temporary Google Sheet when it is no longer needed.

If using Google Sheets is not an available option, another workaround is to first save the Excel file as a Unicode Text (*.txt) file which uses tab characters as field delimiters. The file will then need to be converted to a CSV file using a text editor such as Notepad++ by replacing the tabs with commas.

The following table describes the data columns that are required to be present in the CSV file. The Required column in the table indicates whether a value is required in every row of CSV data. Structurally, every column described below must be present in the CSV file, but the column value may be absent if Required is "No".

See Data File Format for additional information on the required format of the CSV input file.