I'll echo what Bill said and share some of my own thoughts.

Scenario 1 - Disaster where YOU cannot process payroll or get a file to the bank

As Bill said, it's really important to define what the scenario is, and what a "disaster" is.

If you can get your systems up in 24 hours, and it's the day you process payroll, that might not be an emergency. But if it'll be more than 24 hours, maybe that's an emergency.

In this disaster, is there an outage to your single sign on? Can you access shared drives?

The ideal solution for this (sort of) is to have an offsite recovery environment that constantly refreshes from Production and that you can bring up within a few hours, and which can interface with your critical vendors, like your bank.

Let's say you don't have that sort of service.

In that case, it's good to see what options your bank already offers.

Our bank offers a replay service FOR ACH ONLY so that in the event of an emergency, we can re-send the previous pay period's ACH. That isn't perfect, because there are changes in pay, new employees, terminated employees, but it covers 98% of what we need (depending on the pay period).

However, replay is only for ACH. For physical checks, we need to create a separate file (different format from our check file) and have it stored in a secure location that can be accessed outside of our single sign on.

In this case, you need to ensure:

a) access to the "other" drives for those who need it

b) access to procedures

c) a review every six months or year to make sure everything is still working, that the people who are the bank's emergency sign-off are still the right people, etc. At a previous workplace, we'd actually have a senior leader surprise us and say that it was disaster recovery day, and we would need to simulate everything to make sure all of our procedures were up-to-date, etc.

Scenario 2 - Disaster where the bank has a problem

In our case, our bank has their own disaster recovery process so I don't have a lot of concerns that they would not be able to accept a file.

In the case you describe, I would look at the file you create. If it's a file your other bank can accept, then maybe just modifying it for the correct bank account (etc) in the header would be enough.

Otherwise, I'd create a program to produce a disaster recovery DDP file that can be easily produced in this case.