Did you notice that the face value of cheques is changing?

The Canadian Payments Association has issued new specifications as of July 2005, which identify key changes regarding the layout of business and personal cheques. 

Effective April 2005, all cheque orders that are placed through financial institutions (such as most personal cheques) will already ensure compliance, but any other cheques that are not ordered directly through banks or other institutions must conform with the new specifications by December 31, 2006.

The significant changes to the layout are:

• Adoption of a numeric date field and date field indicators;
   

• Mandatory serial numbers in the MICR line;
   

• Increase in minimum length of the cheque to  6.25” or 15.88 cm;
   

• Standardized positions for key fields on the cheque, such as the amount field;
   

• Disallowance of elements which may hinder the capture of the image of a cheque, such as inverse or italic printing, borders below the MICR line, or black carbon on  the reverse side of a cheque;
   

• There are also new printing requirements on the reverse side of a cheque so that the image can be verified.

Companies that print their own cheques, or order them through printers and business supply offices are strongly encouraged to provide pre-production samples of their new cheques to their financial institution’s Quality Assurance Division to verify that they meet the new specifications.  These can be found in full detail at www.cdnpay.ca.

One of the consequences from this change is that any accounting software used to produce cheques may require a re-alignment of the print fields.  These re-alignments may automatically be built in to the upgrades of active software, or may allow for fine-tuning the layout, but for organizations using dated software, or software which is no longer supported, the print layout may not be as easy to correct.

We encourage you to call us, should you require any assistance during this conversion.