The words are what counts, not the figures

When the two amounts on a cheque disagree, the sum written out in words prevails. The rule is old and holds almost everywhere: figures are altered with a stroke of the pen, words far less easily. That is why this tool never asks you to type the amount twice — the words are derived from the figures, so the two cannot diverge.

The words still have to be right. Three French rules go wrong constantly on cheques:

  • vingt and cent take the plural only when multiplied and at the end of the number: quatre-vingts dinars, but quatre-vingt mille dinars; deux cents dinars, but deux cent mille dinars;
  • mille never varies;
  • after million or milliard standing alone you write de: deux millions de dinars algériens — but deux millions cinq cent mille dinars, with no de.

Arabic has its own agreement rules — the counted noun follows the last part of the number, plural from 3 to 10, accusative from 11 to 99, singular above — and the Arabic page applies them.

The bottom strip is off limits

The foot of the cheque carries the CMC7 line: magnetic-ink characters read by machine during clearing, holding the form number, the branch code and the account number. Ink in that band, a crossing-out, a fold — and the cheque goes to manual handling, at best. The preview shades the band in red, and check C05 warns you if a field drops into it.

Aligning, once and for all

Three ways to align, from the fastest to the most reliable.

Pick your bank. The starting positions were measured on real cheques from thirteen institutions — ABC, AGB, BADR, BDL, BEA, BNA, CCP, CPA, Fransabank, Housing Bank, Al Salam, Société Générale Algérie and Trust Bank — scanned at 300 dpi and rectified to 175 × 80 mm. A fourteenth model, “Standard”, is the median of the ten and serves as a starting point for banks not listed. They remain approximate — a photograph of a cheque is not a dimensioned drawing — but they spare you most of the work, and each model keeps its own setting.

Put your own cheque behind the fields. Photograph an expired cheque from your bank, framed on its four edges, and load it into the preview. The fields then align by eye, dragged onto the printed lines: nothing to measure, no ruler. The image stays in your browser, is never uploaded and is never printed.

Print the calibration grid. This is what corrects the printer's own drift, and you do it once per machine:

  1. Print the calibration grid on a blank A4 sheet. It draws a 175 × 80 mm frame — the cheque's exact size — and a centimetre grid numbered from the cheque's top-left corner.
  2. Tape the cheque inside that frame, flat and on all four edges. Use an expired cheque for the test: never align on a form you intend to use.
  3. Feed the sheet back through the printer. In the print dialog leave the paper size on A4, margins on “none” and scale at 100 %. Never pick a custom 175 × 80 size: Chrome then rotates and centres the page, and the text lands in the middle of the cheque, across two pages.
  4. Measure the gap between the grid and the cheque's own lines, and enter it in the two global offsets. That absorbs the printer's drift, which is the same for every field.
  5. Fine-tune each field by dragging it on the preview, or from the keyboard in the table. That absorbs your own bank's layout.
  6. Test again on the copy before feeding a real form.

The setting is stored in the browser: you will not redo it for the next cheque. It belongs to this device and this browser — on another machine you start again.

Precautions that cost dearly when forgotten

  • A cheque with no payee travels like cash. Fill that line before it leaves the office.
  • The space left after the words is struck through with a line — the tool does not do it for you.
  • The signature stays handwritten. No tool prints it, and a printed signature binds no one.
  • The date is the date of issue. Back-dating or post-dating a cheque is not a neutral convenience.
  • The paying-in slip is filled separately: that is not what this tool does.

Read next

Sources and scope

  • Bank of Algeria — standardisation of payment instruments, including instruction no. 05-95 of 25 January 1995 on cheque standardisation, which sets the format and the position of the zones.
  • The positions the tool supplies are a starting point, not a reproduction of any bank's model: check them against your own form, grid in hand.

This tool helps you write a cheque; it replaces neither your bank nor professional advice. It produces no blank cheque and prints no signature.