AFD Products: Bankfinder Manual

INTRODUCTION & INSTALLATION

Introduction

AFD BankFinder® provides a simple way to get full information about a Banks details including the Postal address, and for banks on the UK clearing system the BACS (Bankers Automated Clearing Service), CHAPS (Clearing Houses Automated Payment System), FPS (Faster Payments Service) and C&CCC (Cheque and Credit Clearing Company) information. BankFinder also provides verification of Account Numbers and Debit / Credit Card Numbers and the transcribing of non-standard account numbers to help eliminate errors when capturing users payment details.

As well as full data for the UK clearing systems, BankFinder also includes data from the Irish Payment Services Organisation, so regardless of if you are dealing with payments on the UK, Irish, or both clearing systems BankFinder can cater for you.

You can look up a Bank quickly from it's Postcode, Sort Code or, for banks on the UK clearing system, the BIC Code. If you don't know these BankFinder also allows you to search for a Bank based on the Branch Name, Bank Name, Town, and/or Phone Number, and you can also search for specified text in any field.

AFD Software provides many ways to incorporate its powerful fast addressing features with other programs. In Windows, the stand-alone BankFinder program can be used for simple look-ups, or to squirt data into other programs. If your application has a suitable programming language you can also use our powerful API to access the data from within your own application. Example code is provided for the most popular programming languages.

BankFinder also includes ROBOT® technology (Patent GB 2369699) which allows integration of BankFinder into other applications with no programming required and we don't even need to recognise your application! Simply type the Sort Code or Postcode and BankFinder does the rest and brings back all the fields you require with or without prompting!

All programs and data provided by AFD BankFinder® are copyright and protected by the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act in the United Kingdom and by the Berne convention and other International Copyright treaties.

Under the terms of the BankFinder End User License Agreement, you are permitted to install and use components of AFD BankFinder only on the number of computers, terminals or workstations for which a license is held, although the larger data elements of the system may be installed on a file server for central access if a multi-user license is held. You may additionally make one copy of the program master disks for back-up purposes, but no other copies are permitted, for whatever reason.

Evaluation versions of AFD BankFinder and the associated sample data, are nevertheless copyright material. You may make and distribute copies of the evaluation version and its sample data, but these copies must be complete and unaltered. You may NOT use the sample data provided for any purpose other than to assist in evaluating the usefulness of BankFinder.

Data within AFD BankFinder is the copyright of AFD Computers. You may access and use this data only as part of the AFD BankFinder system, to provide address data for a bona-fide address-based application. You may not extract, reverse-engineer or re-distribute data or programs provided under any circumstances whatsoever.

The BankFinder license is renewable annually and renewal fees include a fresh set of data, program updates and free technical support for the year, or you may subscribe to the POP scheme and cover all costs of using BankFinder including program and data updates, data licenses and technical support for a monthly payment by standing order. BankFinder is only sold with updates with automatic weekly updates provided as standard.

Installation

BankFinder is installed automatically by the installation program and all files are placed in the correct folders. Some information from your License Certificate will be required during installation, so you are advised to have this to hand:

Place the AFD Compact Disc in your drive then:

from the Task Bar, select Start - Run, then type d:\AFDBANK and click OK

... where 'd:' is the drive letter of your CD-Rom drive - usually D:

Follow the instructions and provide the information requested by the installation program.

The installation will create menu entries for BankFinder. These will include entries or icons for BankFinder, the Welcome program, and for various help and information documents.

The evaluation version of the program contains a restricted set of data, covering some of the Birmingham area only.

Registration

On new installations, BankFinder will operate in a special mode, giving full access to data, for about two weeks. To register and fully activate your copy of the program, run the BankFinder 'Welcome' program.

The evaluation version of the program contains only a limited set of data, and does not require registration.

A copy of the 'AFD Welcome' program is supplied to simplify the process of Registration and activation of your program license. To register your copy of BankFinder, you will also need the information printed on the 'License Certificate' supplied with your program.

To register, run the 'Welcome' program:

from the Task Bar select Start - Programs - AFD BankFinder - Welcome

Select your required registration method and follow the instructions on screen to activate your software.

If you are not connected to the Internet you can register using our Automatic Freephone Registration Service on 0800 083 8424 at any time.

You can also register via a WWW browser on another computer by visiting:

http://www.afd.co.uk/register.asp

and simply transfer the information to/from this machine.

If you need personal assistance with the registration process, you may call our HelpDesk on 01624 811712, Monday - Friday 9am - 5pm (except holidays).

De-Registration

If you require to move your AFD BankFinder® Licence from one machine to another or if you will be upgrading a machine and will be replacing your hard drive, you should first de-register the license from that machine and transfer it back to our server. At which point you will be able to register AFD BankFinder® on that other machine instead, and so transfer your license.

To do this, run the Welcome program (as described in the Registration section) and click the 'De-Activate' button to transfer the license back. You can then register it on the new machine as described in the Registration section.

Please note that in the case of wiping a hard disk drive you must de-register before you erase your registration information by wiping that hard disk drive.

If you have problems de-registering or do not have Internet Access then please follow our manual procedure by submitting a Re-registration form.

Technical Support

The AFD range of software is carefully designed to be easy to use, and trouble free. Every product goes through an intensive testing process on every operating system we support. It is a credit to the team who develop and maintain AFD products that they work "out of the box" in tens of thousands of installations, and we receive surprisingly few customer support requests.

Nevertheless, customers do occasionally have difficulties with new or complex installations, new programming projects - or as a result of system damage such as virus attacks: so AFD has provided a friendly, efficient Technical Support service to ensure that everyone can get the maximum benefit from their AFD system.

AFD Technical Support is a free, unlimited service for everyone who is evaluating or using our products. Our team will help you with any aspect of the installation, configuration, programming or use of any of the AFD range of software. We'll even do our best to help and advise with difficulties you're having with software not our own - so long as it relates to the use of an AFD product.

Unfortunately, we cannot help with other hardware or software products.

The HelpDesk is manned Monday - Friday 8:30am to 5:30pm each weekday except holidays:

1.
Email Support is the best and first-choice method of support. Our support engineers will respond to an email within a few minutes - and certainly our aim is to reply within one hour of receipt. You can email us at support@afd.co.uk or from our web site support page using our "Ask the HelpDesk" page which gives us most of the information we need before we respond, thus helping us to direct your enquiry to the correct support engineer. Email is also monitored outside normal office hours, each evening after 9:00pm and on holidays and at weekends (except Christmas Day) after 10:00am, 4:00pm and 9:00pm.

2. Telephone Support. Call our HelpDesk (Mon - Fri 8:30am to 5:30pm) on 01624 811712 to speak directly to one of our product experts.

We won't waste your time and money in a hold system: if all our operators are busy you will be transferred to our purpose built call-handling system. Please leave a message giving as many details of your problem as possible, plus your name, telephone number and product serial number if you have one. One of our qualified engineers will aim to return your call within 15 minutes - but no later than within the hour at exceptionally busy times.

Data & Data Updates

The Bank data is constantly changing as a result of internal re-organisation within Banks, the establishing of new branches, relocation and closures of others, and changes to Postal addresses. To ensure that you get the maximum benefit from your investment in AFD BankFinder program, you must ensure that the data you are using is as up-to-date as possible.

AFD have invested in state-of-the-art technology to provide you with the best possible address data within our programs. Taking raw data direct from our suppliers tapes and converting it ready for release to our customers in just three days, means that AFD Data is often weeks and sometimes months more up-to-date than data from other sources.

Automatic weekly updates are provided as standard and work seemlessly in the background, downloading updated data as it becomes available. While we expect this to be the most convienent option for most customers, manual monthly updates are avaliable as an alternative which, as a condition of your license, must be regularly applied.

Make sure that you place your order so that each optional data update is sent to you as soon as it is prepared - or join the POP scheme so that all costs of Data Licenses, Program and Data Updates are covered in one modest standing order payment and shipped automatically when available.

Address, Postcode and Bank solutions