Long'ish on and off exchange with 'Super Support Man' aka Kevin M over IM this morning trying to sort out a frustrating check printing issue a customer was having. Their bank had provided a specification sheet showing the required layout for the check including the the 'where' and 'how' the MICR string should look.
A commercial font was being used and it was not rendering correctly, basically the string was too long for the space allocated by the bank. It looked like a spacing or scaling issue on BIP's part. I had been scratching my head over it for a while - too long in fact. I can fully understand the pain and misery of not being able to cut checks - they still have to be one of the most mission critical documents for an organization today.
While chatting (typing) to 'Super Kev', I was idly trying some of the other MICR fonts I have on my machine in MSWord against the customer's font. Naming no names here are the results.
Not huge differences but enough that over a 25 character MICR string they will be significantly different enough for certain banks to reject test checks because of the length of the string.
Its not a completely fair image, two of the fonts are 'free', one of those is the MICR font included with Publisher. There are a few commercial fonts in there too but just using the vanilla font flavor.
If you want to use Publisher to generate checks and you purchase a commercial font, please check out the user guides. Im not a 'user guide' type of guy - strange considering how much effort I put into the BIP docs with Leslie. Writing documentation yourself gives you a whole new appreciation for the pain and misery folks go through writing it and then no one reads it. But I digress ... again!
Typically, the commercial vendors don't just provide a single font. They provide a range of them and a test document for you to print. From that printed document, you can then match the correct font to your bank's specification requirement.
If you use Publisher's font you should be good for spacing but there is an enhancement request out there to help you to tweak the character spacing if you need it.
Hopefully, in this case, things will now be resolved quickly and the customer can at last start cutting checks. Good luck to you with check printing and don't forget, RTFM :0)
Comments (2)
Few comments
1. Individual banks in US do not have different standards. All US banks do only magnetic verification of the MICR. The standard is much more rigid for Canadian checks. CA does optical reads along with magnetic read. Get that standard for CA Accounting standards board web site.
2. Get a true MiCR check printer. A normal printer with MICR cartridge will overheat and throw the font off. A normal laser printer will be good for few tens of checks and then you will start getting interesting outcomes.
3. Learn to use a MICR gauge before sending test checks off to banks. Expensive for a piece of plastic but it will save your career. Do NOT use photo copied checks as guides.
4. Read every page of the test result from end to end.
5. When building the MICR string, pay attention to character spacing in MS-Word. I usually ask my programmers to work in mm (millimeters) rather than inches.
6. Watch out for the "accidental" bold on all or some of the characters. We had a situation where RBC (Canada) said that we were off by 4/100 of a millimeter. After 200 test checks, 5 complete rebuilds of the template, based on the 1000x magnification that the RBC provides we figured out that out 0 (ZEROs) in the entire string were in bold font.
7. If possible, guide your customer to stay away from middle and bottom check. Top check is a lot easier to work with.
8. Work with bank IT not with the bank VPs who are nothing but techno babbling account managers with big titles. The IT guys can guide you to your issue in a matter of minutes.
That is all for today.
Posted by James | September 3, 2009 7:29 AM
Posted on September 3, 2009 07:29
Thanks for the insight James
Posted by Tim Dexter | September 3, 2009 10:01 AM
Posted on September 3, 2009 10:01