This article describes the changes made to add Purposes codes with Unity® Practice Management
Purpose Codes became mandatory on any CHAPS payment from 1st of May 2025
What's a Purpose Code?
From 1st May 2025 financial standardisation rules changed in the form of "ISO20022". This change aims to introduce a single global standard for financial messages.
More detail here : https://www.iso20022.org/about-iso-20022
Part of this change is "Purpose Codes" - This assigns a 4-letter code to a payment which allows the bank to establish in more detail what a transaction is regarding.
In total there are almost 300 different purpose codes, the Bank of England has categorized 127 of them.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/payment-and-settlement/rtgs-renewal-programme/iso-20022
Changes in Unity®
In order to accommodate the Purpose Code changes of ISO020022 changes have been made in the Unity® web application
We've tried to make this change as low impact as possible. In Unity® (formerly Quill) users will now see two extra dropdowns within Payment E-chits along with a hyperlink to the BOE's purpose code list linked above.
If the transaction type is CHAPS and has payment destination information, then the Purpose Code field is mandatory, for any other transaction type the Purpose Code is optional.
Within Accounts
You'll see an additional field in the same format as the Sort code & Account numbers.