How-to

Pay a bill with Faster Payments

One-shot urgent payment for a single bill. Generates an instruction PDF you paste into your bank.

2 min readLast updated 26 May 2026
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What it does

Faster Payments single-pay is the answer to "this contractor invoice arrived this morning and we need to pay it today". Rather than batching into a BACS run that takes 3 working days, you raise a one-bill FPS payment run and get an instruction PDF: the supplier's sort code, account number, reference, and amount, formatted in monospace so there's no ambiguity. You paste those details into your bank's manual Faster Payments screen, send the payment from the bank's portal, and click Mark paid when you get the confirmation.

Blankitt doesn't initiate the actual transfer — Faster Payments has no bulk file format like BACS — so the operator stays in the bank's flow for the final send. We handle everything around it: approval, audit, the GL post, the bill status flip, the journal.

How to use it

  1. Open the bill you want to pay (status must be sent or overdue — not partial, which uses Record Payment instead).
  2. Click Pay now (Faster Payments) in the action bar.
  3. Confirm in the dialog. The system creates a 1-item payment run with payment_method='fps' and runs your approval policy. If no policy matches, the run auto-finalises and the instruction PDF opens immediately.
  4. If your policy thresholds catch the bill, the run lands in pending_approval. The approver decides; once approved, open the payment run and download the PDF from there.
  5. Paste the destination details from the PDF into your bank's Faster Payments / Send Money screen. Verify each digit.
  6. Once your bank confirms the send, return to the payment run and click Mark paid. The bill flips to paid and the journal posts.

Tips

  • The supplier must have a sort code + account number on their contact record. Without those the FPS button errors with a clear message; add the details on the contact and retry.
  • The reference defaults to the bill number, truncated to 18 characters (the cross-bank-safe limit). Override it in the PDF request body if your supplier needs a PO number instead.
  • FPS runs don't need your company's BACS originator bank details — you're sending from your bank's portal, not a bulk file. So even if Company profile → Bank details is empty, FPS still works.
  • Same approval policies apply as BACS runs. Configure thresholds in Settings → Approval policies with applies_to='payment_run'.

Still stuck? Email support or open the support widget in the bottom-right.