The short answer

Paying employees? Use PPD. Paying vendors and suppliers? Use CCD. If you pay a contractor, look at the account rather than the work: an individual's personal account takes PPD, a limited company's business account takes CCD.

Side by side

	CCD	PPD
Who you are paying	A business — a vendor, a contractor operating as a company, or another account your own business owns.	An individual — an employee, a contractor paid as a person, a customer receiving a refund.
What the code stands for	Corporate Credit or Debit Entry.	Prearranged Payment and Deposit Entry.
Authorization you need	A trading-partner agreement between the two businesses. Corporate rules are lighter, because both sides are commercial parties.	A written authorization from the individual, kept on file. Consumer protections are stronger and the return windows longer.
How long the receiver has to dispute	Two banking days for a corporate account holder to claim a debit was unauthorized.	Sixty calendar days for a consumer to dispute an unauthorized debit.
Remittance detail	One optional addenda record, typically an invoice number. For many invoices in one payment you would need CTX, which this generator does not write.	One optional addenda record, usually a short pay-period or reference note.
Typical use here	Vendor and supplier runs.	Payroll and direct deposit.

What happens if you pick the wrong one

For credits, the practical risk is low. Money sent under the wrong entry class usually still posts — the receiving bank cares far more about the routing and account numbers than about the three-letter code. What you lose is the audit trail: a payroll run recorded as corporate payments is harder to defend if anyone later asks how the payment was authorized.

On the debit side the stakes are real rather than clerical. Debiting a consumer account under a corporate code is the specific situation return code R05 exists to reject, and it carries a sixty-day dispute window. This generator writes credits only, so R05 cannot arise from a file made here — but it is the reason the distinction is enforced at all. The ACH return code list covers what each code means.

One class per file

The entry class lives in the batch header, and a file made here holds a single batch — so one file carries one class. If you pay employees and vendors in the same run, generate two files. Splitting them is also cleaner for your bank's approval process, since the two runs usually need different reviewers.

You choose the class in the configuration step after importing your spreadsheet. See all ACH SEC codes for the full list of entry classes, or how it works for the path from spreadsheet to bank upload.