# The YGC and vExchange file format, explained > What actually moves between a creditor and a collections law firm on the YGC/vExchange network: placements down as record type 01, statuses as pcodes, the S101 acknowledgment, money and status records back up as types 30 through 46, and the translation tables in between — sourced to the vendors' published documentation. - Source: https://ottoforfirms.com/guides/ygc-vexchange-file-format-explained/ - Publisher: Otto — https://ottoforfirms.com - Updated: 2026-09-01 YGC ("You've Got Claims") is the data standard creditors and collections law firms use to exchange placements, statuses and money records. Vertican Technologies has operated the network since 2014 and now runs it through vExchange, which publishes "5,000+ unique fields and 130+ record types". This page explains the main record types and flows in plain English. ## Key facts - YGC began as YouveGotClaims, from Automated Collection Control, Inc. Vertican acquired it in a stock-for-stock merger effective June 1, 2014. - Vertican told users the "YGC web-based application will no longer be available as of April 2022"; vExchange is its successor. - vExchange publishes its scale as "5,000+ unique fields and 130+ record types" within its proprietary data standard. - In CollectMax's published documentation, upload records run from type 30 (payments) through type 46 (physical assets), and a new placement arrives as record type 01. - Statuses are pcodes, and they survived the migration: "YGC = cc:S101 vExchange = vX:S101" is Vertican's own example. - The full field layouts are not public. Where the published documents do not specify a detail, this page says so. That is the answer. What Otto adds is that the check runs before the action rather than in next month's report — on the file, with the record written as the work happens. [See it on your own files](https://ottoforfirms.com/contact/) · [See what it costs](https://ottoforfirms.com/pricing/) ## What YGC is, and who runs it You've Got Claims started as the exchange platform of YGC Solutions — Automated Collection Control, Inc. — and became Vertican's in a stock-for-stock merger effective June 1, 2014, announced as a combination that would "synergize the YouveGotClaims technology with case management software from CLS and Q-Soft." In 2022 Vertican retired the original web application — its own migration deck states the "YGC web-based application will no longer be available as of April 2022" — and moved the service onto vExchange. Three things carried over by design, per the same deck: the data exchange itself, the analytics, and the YGC data standard with its status codes, the pcodes. "Senders and receivers could continue using the YGC data format": Vertican "has built a YGC-to-vExchange Business Adapter that will translate data to and from vExchange", and "Collection-Master, Q-LawE, and Q-Law users will be able to continue using the YGC DTP (version 3.3) to communicate with other Senders outside of vExchange." So in practice "YGC" today names a file format and code vocabulary that still moves a large share of creditor-to-firm traffic, riding on Vertican's vExchange network. ## Senders, receivers, and what the network holds The network's two roles are the creditor side and the working side. A Sender — a creditor, debt buyer or forwarder — places accounts and consumes reporting; a Receiver — typically a collections law firm or agency — works the accounts in its own system of record and reports back. Vertican's vExchange page describes the reporting half directly: the platform "captures data that is reflective of the actual activity that has occurred on an account in a Receiver's system of record" and presents it "in both a summarized and detailed view." The published scale of the vocabulary is "5,000+ unique fields and 130+ record types", and the published volume is "Placements Per Month: 80k – 100k" representing "Dollars Placed Per Month: $200 million – $300 million". The complete catalog of those record types is not published openly; what is publicly documented in useful detail is the subset that one participant system, JST's CollectMax, describes in its own help files, and that subset is the backbone of the flows below. ## A placement comes down: record type 01 New business arrives as a record type 01 — the master record of the placement. CollectMax's published download settings show what a firm's system reads off it: the creditor name field (Cred_Name), which can drive a translation table mapping the sender's creditor names onto the firm's own client records; a second creditor-name field usable as the plaintiff caption; the open date as the contract date; the original creditor; and the opening interest balance, with configurable choices about which date interest accrues from — original interest date, charge-off date, last payment date, purchase date or download date — and whether the file's commission and interest rates are honored or overridden by the firm's own client settings. Payments the creditor takes directly, rather than through the firm, come down too: CollectMax documents auto-posting options for "Record Type 12" direct-payment entries. The exact field-by-field layout of an 01 record is not in the public documentation; the settings pages establish what the record carries without printing its byte map. ## The acknowledgment: S101 The network's statuses are pcodes — coded status messages — and the first one in an account's life is the acknowledgment of placement, S101. Two published documents establish it. Vertican's migration deck uses it as the worked example of code continuity, "YGC = cc:S101 vExchange = vX:S101", and CollectMax's download settings document that the firm's system enters it automatically on receipt: the option to "Suppress Automatic Entry of S101 Acknowledgment PCode ... can be set at the Forwarder ID Download Settings level." In plain English: when the placement file is processed, the firm's system generates the status that tells the creditor the account arrived, and firms that acknowledge some senders differently can turn the automatic entry off per forwarder. The public documents do not specify the acknowledgment deadline a sender expects, and sender requirements differ — that is a term of each placement relationship, not of the format. ## What goes back up: record types 30 through 46 The firm's reporting to the creditor travels as numbered record types, and JST publishes the cleanest open list of them, as the records CollectMax uploads to the network. Financial transactions are type 30 — payments, and costs distinguished by a return code. Debtor information is 31, with second and third debtors on 33. Employment information is 34, bank and asset information 35, miscellaneous information including the debtor's attorney 36. The legal caption — plaintiff and defendant names — is 37. The reconciliation record, summarizing claim balance and creditor information, is 38. Network notes — the paperless notes and coded messages — are 39. Legal information for suit and judgment is 41, balance and interest 42, payment plan information 43, bankruptcy 44, probate 45 and physical assets 46. Read as a whole, the list is the answer to a question firms rarely see written down: what does the client actually receive about the work? It is also, incidentally, a vendor-published inventory of what a collections file contains, which is why the migration guides in this reference use it as an export checklist. ## Money records, specifically The financial flow is narrower than the status flow, and CollectMax's published process description draws the boundary: "The YGC Interface only uploads payments, costs, return checks and payment reversals and cost reversals." Transactions posted through a selected date that have not already been uploaded are gathered per relationship — "The upload process will create a separate file for each forwarder/firm ID combination" — and the transfer itself is the firm's job, in the vendor's own words: "The interface creates the files but it is your responsibility to transfer the files to You've Got Claims using your Mailman Account." The reconciliation record, type 38, is the periodic balance summary that lets the two sides prove their ledgers agree. What the public documents do not specify: remittance itself. The network moves the record of money; how the money moves is a term of the engagement agreement. ## Translation: your codes are not your client's codes Both directions of the exchange pass through translation tables, because the network's vocabulary and any firm's internal vocabulary differ. Downward, CollectMax documents an Action Translation Table that converts "downloaded network note/status codes into action codes" — the firm's own work-queue vocabulary — so that "Each time these codes are downloaded from the client, the defined action item will be added to the debtor's account", with an optional delay in days; its help gives recall codes as the worked example, so recalled accounts surface on a report. A separate client translation table maps the placement file's creditor names onto the firm's client records. Upward, the same discipline runs in reverse: the events a firm's system records must be expressed as the pcodes the sender expects. The general point survives any one product's implementation: a YGC integration is not just file transport, it is a maintained mapping between two code vocabularies, and the mapping — who owns it, who updates it when a client adds codes — is where exchange integrations actually live or die. ## Compliance filters in the pipe: Universal Gates vExchange also runs rules inside the network itself. Vertican describes Universal Gates as "Business rules (filters) that exclude/flag data not meeting the Sender compliance requirements in real-time": when a receiver's file hits a gate, the network can "Reject the data and send a notification to the Sender" or "allow the data to pass, populating a report with the exceptions." For a firm, the practical meaning is that a client's data-quality and compliance requirements can be enforced at the exchange boundary, before the data reaches the client's system — so a rejected record is a network event with a notification trail, not a quiet gap in a month-end report. Which gates any given sender runs is the sender's configuration, and is not published. ## What the public documentation does not specify Plainly, so this page cannot be over-read. The complete vExchange record-type catalog — the "130+ record types" — is not publicly enumerated; the 01/12/30-through-46 set above is the subset one participant vendor documents openly, and other systems' implementations may cover more. Field-by-field layouts, field lengths and required-versus-optional rules are not public. Acknowledgment timing expectations, file naming and delivery schedules are relationship terms, not published format rules. And this page describes the exchange as its operators and participants document it; it makes no claim about any legal obligation, which turns on your engagement agreements and applicable law, not on a file format. Participants get the authoritative specification from Vertican; everyone else, including this page, gets the published fraction. ## Where Otto fits Otto's exchange surface does the same jobs described above — placements in, statuses and money records back, per-client code translation maintained as configuration rather than folklore — and its mechanism is described at /platform/data-exchange/. This page stands on its own either way: the format predates us, the network belongs to Vertican, and a firm on any system has to understand the same record flows. ## Primary sources 1. [YGC Joins Vertican](https://www.insidearm.com/news/00008164-ygc-joins-vertican/) — Trade press, 20 June 2014 — the merger that made the network Vertican's (insideARM · retrieved 26 August 2026) > This combination creates a company that will synergize the YouveGotClaims technology with case management software from CLS and Q-Soft. 1. [YGC-2-vExchange Step-by-Step Guidance](https://vertican.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/YGC-2-vExchange-Step-by-Step-Guidance.pdf) — Vertican's own migration deck — the retirement of the web application and the code continuity example (Vertican Technologies · retrieved 26 August 2026) > Vertican has built a YGC-to-vExchange Business Adapter that will translate data to and from vExchange. 1. [vExchange product page](https://vertican.com/vexchange/) — Vertican's own description of the network's vocabulary, volume and Universal Gates (Vertican Technologies · retrieved 26 August 2026) > Business rules (filters) that exclude/flag data not meeting the Sender compliance requirements in real-time. 1. [CollectMax help — YGC Upload Record Types](https://www.collectmax.com/webhelp/Content/YGC_Upload_Record_Types.htm) — The publicly documented record-type list, 30 through 46 (JST CollectMax · retrieved 26 August 2026) > The following Record Types are uploaded to the You've Got Claims Network. 1. [CollectMax help — YGC Financial Upload Process](https://www.collectmax.com/webhelp/Content/YGC_Financial_Upload_Process.htm) — What the money flow carries, and whose job the transfer is (JST CollectMax · retrieved 26 August 2026) > The YGC Interface only uploads payments, costs, return checks and payment reversals and cost reversals. 1. [CollectMax help — YGC Defaults, Download Settings](https://www.collectmax.com/webhelp/Content/YGC%20Defaults%20-%20DLSettings.htm) — Record type 01 fields, record type 12 direct payments, and the S101 acknowledgment pcode (JST CollectMax · retrieved 26 August 2026) > Suppress Automatic Entry of S101 Acknowledgment PCode: this cannot be set at the default level but can be set at the Forwarder ID Download Settings level. 1. [CollectMax help — YGC Action Translation Table](https://www.collectmax.com/webhelp/Content/Network/YGC/YGC_Action_Translation_Table.htm) — Translating network codes into the firm's own action codes (JST CollectMax · retrieved 26 August 2026) > Each time these codes are downloaded from the client, the defined action item will be added to the debtor's account. ## Related - [Operational guides for collections law firms](https://ottoforfirms.com/guides/) — How to actually do the work: validation requests, call frequency, bureau disputes, filing packages, bank questionnaires, scrubs and e-filing — each cited to primary sources. - [Exchange — the placement file gateway](https://ottoforfirms.com/platform/data-exchange/) — How Otto takes client placement files in, validates field identity before loading, quarantines bad files whole, and returns events in each client's own codes. - [Collection-Master vs CollectMax: ownership, architecture and pricing model](https://ottoforfirms.com/compare/collection-master-vs-collectmax/) — The two longest-serving creditor-side collections platforms compared to each other — who owns each after the 2026 Embrace acquisition of JST, what each vendor publishes about architecture and price, and both roadmaps in the vendors' own words. Otto appears once, at the end. - [Collection-Master firms: the questions to ask Vertican](https://ottoforfirms.com/guides/collection-master-firms-questions-for-vertican/) — Vertican says Collection-Master is here to stay and that its future converges on Q-LawE — both in the same February 2025 deck. The diligence questions that turn those published statements into written answers: support, roadmap, pricing, data export, and the exchange network. - [CollectMax after the Embrace acquisition: what to ask JST now](https://ottoforfirms.com/guides/collectmax-after-the-embrace-acquisition/) — Embrace Software acquired JST, the maker of CollectMax and Accis, in early 2026. What both announcements actually say, who Embrace is by its own account, and the diligence questions any firm should put to an acquired vendor — support, roadmap, pricing, and data export rights. - [Migrating a collections firm to a new case management system](https://ottoforfirms.com/migrating/) — What actually moves when a creditor-side collections firm changes case management systems: the trust ledger, the media, the client interfaces, and the history. ## About Otto That is the procedure. Otto is the system that runs it — the same steps, enforced in the workflow instead of kept in someone's head. Bring one of your own files and we will walk it through. - [Book a walkthrough](https://ottoforfirms.com/contact/) - [See what it costs](https://ottoforfirms.com/pricing/) --- This is an informational reference, not legal advice, and using it creates no attorney-client relationship. Limitations periods turn on facts this page cannot know — which state's law governs, the contract type, when the claim accrued, and whether anything tolled or revived it. Confirm against the primary source and your own counsel before acting.