This record designates the physical file characteristics and identifies the immediate origin and destination of the entries contained with the file. In addition, this record includes date, time, and file identification fields used to uniquely identify the file.

This record identifies the originator and briefly describes the reason for the transactions. This record also identifies the settlement bank account and other transaction processing controls. The Batch Header Record indicates the effective entry date of all transactions within the batch. The information contained in the record applies uniformly to all subsequent Entry Detail Records in the batch.

The Entry Detail Records contain the information necessary to identify the patron's bank account (i.e. financial institution, account number, patron's name, and the debit or credit amount).

Each batch control record contains the counts, hash totals, and total dollar controls for the preceding detail entries within the indicated batch.

This overall file control record contains the dollar, entry, and hash total accumulations for all Batch Control Records in the file. This record also contains counts of the number of records and the number of batches within the file.