On Sept. 23 a major milestone in the journey toward faster payments will be reached: New rules will go into effect that will enable the same-day processing of ACH payments.

Vendors are working to make sure banks are ready to take advantage. Adam Anderson, CTO of Q2, a provider of cloud-based banking software, said that his company will have same-day ACH capability ready to go as soon as the new functionality is turned on. The most common uses of ACH for Q2 users are payroll, person-to-person and billpay transactions, Anderson said.

The payments company Dwolla has its own alternative to ACH — the realtime FiSync network — but the company also handles ACH for banks and businesses. Today, Dwolla unveiled its dashboard for ACH users to track their transactions — a shot of the analytics sections is below. If this looks ordinary to you, you must not be familiar with ACH files, which are ugly and barely human-readable.

“Standard ACH comes with no web hooks, no API wrapper, no KYC-AML,” said Jordan Lampe, director of communication and policy affairs for Dwolla. Standard ACH has no procedures for handling rejects and no way to help users keep their compliance updated, for example. “But it is affordable and reliable. We’re extending that business value to other areas of the company.”

The dashboard is a product that will work out of the box for users of Dwolla’s white-label ACH solution, Lampe said. it contains three views: Transactions, Customers, and Dashboard, which is the analytics portion. The tool, Lampe noted, grew out of the dashboard Dwolla built to monitor its own product, which went live in 2010.

“The bulk of demand for ACH is from SMBs, commercial uses, as a replacement for wire uses” said Anderson of Q2. That would be payroll and disbursements, though ACH is also used for billpay transactions and peer-to-peer payments. “It’s a less expensive payment type but has been limited to 1- or 2-day windows. But the infrastructure of the system is robust and mature.”