Patent ID: 7814017

Claim:
A computer system for processing employee direct payroll deposits, comprising: a computer-readable storage medium having instructions stored therein; one or more processors executing the instructions stored in the computer-readable medium to implement a counterparty management module to permit an employer to add employee bank accounts to a funds transfer system provided by a banking institution, the employee bank accounts being respectively associated with different employees of the employer, the employer having a bank account at the banking institution, the counterparty management module being accessible to the employer by way of an online banking area of a website of the banking institution, including to provide screens to the employer by way of the Internet, permit the employer to specify, by providing responses to prompts contained in the screens, a payroll-related pay group that includes the employee bank accounts and to specify characteristics of the transferring of funds to the pay group as a whole, including a time by which the funds are to be transferred, permit the employer to specify, by providing responses to the prompts contained in the screens, bank account numbers for each of the employee bank accounts; a payment module to generate payment instructions for transferring funds from the employer bank account to the employee bank accounts; an exceptions engine to receive a return indicator indicating that an error has occurred in the transfer of the funds and that the transfer of the funds has failed, wherein the error relates to a specific one of the employee bank accounts within the pay group, and wherein the return indicator includes details of a failure type, generate plain-language correction instructions for the employer suggesting a corrective course of action to correct the error indicated by the return indicator, including accessing a look-up table including a list of return indicators, provide a notification via e-mail of the failed transfer to the employer, provide, to the employer, an identification of the specific one of the employee bank accounts within the pay group for which the error occurred, and provide, to the employer, the correction instructions for the failed transfer of funds to permit the transfer of funds to be successfully completed.