Repair a Broken BACS File
When a BACS STD18 file will not load, will not submit or comes straight back, the fault is usually in the file’s structure rather than in the payments. The repair covers the whole set of format defects: records padded or trimmed to exactly 114 characters, LF, CR and mixed line endings normalised to CRLF, the UTL1 trailer label put back, sort codes normalised to NN-NN-NN and account numbers to 8 digits, and the UTL1 total value and record count recomputed from the payment records. A field with no readable value is left exactly as it is — nothing is invented, and the payments are never altered.
Payment file
Drop a .txt or .bacs file in the box below, or paste its contents. The file is checked as soon as it arrives: if it cannot be read as a BACS payment file you are told why and charged nothing. The corrected file — the fix itself — is what you pay for.
Drag and drop your file here
Your file
No file yet. Drop or paste one and it is checked straight away — a file we cannot read as a BACS file is refused here, free of charge.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the repair actually change?
- Record widths, line endings, the UTL1 trailer label, the sort code and account number formatting of each payment record, and the UTL1 total value and record count. Nothing else in the file is rewritten.
- How do I check what was fixed?
- The corrected file comes back to you, and its UTL1 trailer carries the record count and total value, so you can line the result up against your original figures before you resubmit.
- Will this fix a Direct Debit that came back unpaid?
- No. A returned Direct Debit carries a reason code (ARUDD, AUDDIS or ADDACS) and describes a banking or mandate issue, not a file problem. This repair covers file format only.
- Can I run the repair from a script?
- Yes — POST /api/repair returns the corrected file as a download, with the number of fixes in the X-Fixes-Applied header.