Why validate IBANs?

International Bank Account Numbers (IBAN) are used in +70 countries and are mandatory in many of them (for instance, in countries within the SEPA or Single Euro Payments Area). One of their advantages is that, unlike other bank number formats such as BIC, they have check digits to minimize the risks of typographic and transcription errors.

Often businesses store IBANs in their CRMs, either as part of the billing details of their customers or as payment details of their vendors and suppliers. Furthermore, they can be stored for each individual invoice and even as in the individual records of the business employees for payment of their salaries. All this shows how relevant IBANs are for day to day operations and the importance of them being valid and properly formatted.

This extension automatically verifies the checksum of the IBANs you insert into Zoho CRM and informs you when IBANs do not pass the checksum test, so that you can promptly amend them. Plus, optionally, it standarizes their format to the electronic variant (i.e. upper case and without spaces).

What the extension does (and what not)

The extension performs a checksum validation of the IBAN. This being a first layer of IBAN validation, it detects most invalid IBANs (usually because of typographic and transcription errors).

The extension does NOT perform deeper, additional validations such as country specific format match or BBAN account number checksum. Those are more complex checks usually performed by financial institutions. Should you require those additional validations, there are other third-party services offering them, however at a considerable price if used at scale and requiring you to send IBANs over the internet.

As rule of thumb: if the extension considers an IBAN to be invalid, it is invalid. But if an IBAN passes the validation, there could still be issues affecting the validity such as wrong length for country or BBAN account number checksum.

Supported CRM modules

• Accounts
• Contacts
• Invoices
• Vendors
• Custom modules (requires additional configuration, please contact us at [email protected] for instructions)

Getting Started

1. Install the extension from the Zoho Marketplace.
2. Optionally, adjust the extension settings as described below.
3. The extension is now working.

Extension settings

Example on how to find the API name of a field

The extension settings will appear upon installation and are the following:

Enforce Electronic Format: if checked (“ON”), any evaluated IBAN will have the electronic format applied, i.e. all spaces will be removed. If unchecked (“OFF”), the spacings of the IBAN will be kept as they are. Characters from A to Z will be converted to upper case regardless of this setting. The default value is ON.

Accounts/Contacts/Invoices/Vendors IBAN Field API Name: these text fields define what field for each of the supported modules will be evaluated by the extension for IBAN validation (the “IBAN field”). The default value is ibanchecksumvalidator__IBAN, which is the API name of the field created by the extension with the label IBAN.

Should you want to use another field instead (e.g. a preexisting IBAN field created by you), you may change the field value to the exact (case sensitive) API name of that field. If an invalid name is provided, the field data type is not text or the field is left blank, validation will be disabled for that specific module.

To find the API name of the IBAN field, go to Zoho CRM Settings > Developer Space > APIs, then select the upper button API Names and then the name of the module. A list with all module fields will appear; you will find the IBAN field API name in the middle column, which is labelled “API Name”.

Example on how to find the API name of a field

You can change the settings at any time going to Zoho CRM Settings > Marketplace > All and selecting the extension.

How to use

IBAN status field

Once at least one module has an IBAN field defined, the extension will automatically evaluate the IBAN field, each and every time a record is created or edited.

IBAN evaluation takes place:

• When a record is created or edited: upon saving the record.
• When only a specific record IBAN field is edited: upon saving the field or pressing enter.

Upon validation and regardless of the result, all alphabetical characters of the IBAN (a-z) will be formatted to uppercase. Furthermore, if Enforce Electronic Format is ON, the IBAN will be formatted to the electronic variant (i.e. all spaces will be removed).

The result of the validation (“Valid” or “Invalid”) will appear after a few seconds in the drop-down field IBAN status. If the IBAN field is empty, IBAN status will be empty as well.

IBAN status field

Bugs, improvement suggestions and feature requests

Should the extension behave in a way you believe to be caused by a bug, please report it to us at [email protected] for further investigation. We also invite you to share with us at the same email address any improvement suggestion and feature request you might have.

Privacy

The extension performs all operations within your Zoho CRM instance and no data is shared with third parties, not even with us.

Read the Privacy Terms for more information.

Uninstall

You may uninstall the extension from the Zoho CRM admin panel, going to the Zoho Marketplace section.

Credits

The logo of the extension has been designed by Flaticon.