Automating NBAD balance inquiry into OpenCATS for contractor payment tracking
Posted: 26 Feb 2026, 13:51
Hi everyone,
We are using OpenCATS to manage contract recruiters and temporary staff placements. One of the challenges we are facing right now is around tracking contractor payments against actual bank receipts. Our company account is with National Bank of Abu Dhabi in the UAE, and most of our clients pay us via bank transfer.
At the moment, our finance team checks the NBAD online banking portal every morning to confirm which invoices have been paid. Then we manually update a custom field in OpenCATS to mark the placement or contractor record as paid. This process is time consuming and sometimes payments are missed for a day or two because the balance inquiry screen does not clearly separate pending and cleared funds.
What we would like to do is automatically pull either the daily balance or the transaction list from NBAD and sync that information with OpenCATS, so we can trigger a status change when a specific invoice reference appears in the bank transactions. I understand OpenCATS does not have built in banking integrations, so I am looking for advice on the best technical approach.
Has anyone here connected OpenCATS to a bank API or used a middleware script to read transaction data and update records in the database? I am comfortable working with PHP and MySQL but I want to avoid modifying core files if possible. Any guidance on a clean integration method would be greatly appreciated.
We are using OpenCATS to manage contract recruiters and temporary staff placements. One of the challenges we are facing right now is around tracking contractor payments against actual bank receipts. Our company account is with National Bank of Abu Dhabi in the UAE, and most of our clients pay us via bank transfer.
At the moment, our finance team checks the NBAD online banking portal every morning to confirm which invoices have been paid. Then we manually update a custom field in OpenCATS to mark the placement or contractor record as paid. This process is time consuming and sometimes payments are missed for a day or two because the balance inquiry screen does not clearly separate pending and cleared funds.
What we would like to do is automatically pull either the daily balance or the transaction list from NBAD and sync that information with OpenCATS, so we can trigger a status change when a specific invoice reference appears in the bank transactions. I understand OpenCATS does not have built in banking integrations, so I am looking for advice on the best technical approach.
Has anyone here connected OpenCATS to a bank API or used a middleware script to read transaction data and update records in the database? I am comfortable working with PHP and MySQL but I want to avoid modifying core files if possible. Any guidance on a clean integration method would be greatly appreciated.