A cheque leaf is a single cheque — one detachable page from a cheque book. A book of 50 leaves contains 50 cheques.
The word is worth knowing because it turns up in three places that matter: bank charges, cheque book requests, and cheque printing setup.
Where it matters practically
Bank charges
Banks often allow a number of free leaves per period and charge beyond it. If your business writes a lot of cheques, that per-leaf charge is a real line item worth knowing.
Ordering a book
Requests are made in leaves — 25, 50 or 100 being typical. A business printing cheques in batches gets through them faster than one writing them by hand, so order accordingly.
Setting up printing
This is the one that catches people. When you create a cheque book in ChequeMaster you enter the first cheque number and the total number of cheques — the leaf count. The software generates the range from those two figures.
Get the count wrong and the range does not match the paper. A book of 50 entered as 100 leaves you with 50 phantom cheque numbers in the system that do not exist physically, and reports that quietly disagree with reality.
Count from the book in your hand. Do not assume, and do not rely on what you ordered — banks occasionally supply a different count.
Spoiled leaves
A misprinted or torn leaf should be marked as Cancelled rather than quietly discarded, so the number is accounted for. An unexplained gap in a cheque sequence is exactly the kind of thing an auditor asks about, and "we threw it away" is a poor answer.
In ChequeMaster, Cancelled is one of the cheque statuses, so the leaf stays in the record with its reason. See reports and advanced search.
