Emirates NBD is the cheque most UAE businesses end up printing most often, and its layout has a couple of quirks worth knowing before you set it up. ChequeMaster ships with this layout already built, so in practice you select it and print — but if you are adjusting it, or checking why something lands in the wrong place, this is what the layout actually specifies.
Dimensions
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Cheque width | 202 mm |
| Cheque height | 93 mm |
| Date format | DD/MM/YYYY |
| Default font | Arial |
| Text direction | Left to right |
202 x 93 mm is the common size across a good part of the UAE market — Habib Bank AG Zurich uses the same footprint. It is not universal though. First Abu Dhabi Bank is noticeably smaller at 155 x 87 mm, and Emirates Islamic runs 206 x 100 mm, so a layout built for one is not reusable on the other.
How the fields are positioned
Three things about the Emirates NBD layout differ from the Indian cheques people often set up first:
The date is one field, not boxed digits
Many Indian cheques print the date into eight separate boxes, one character each, which means the layout has to position eight fields precisely. Emirates NBD uses a single continuous date field instead. The layout reflects that — the individual day, month and year character positions exist but are switched off, and only the combined date field is active. Less to align, and nothing to drift out of its box.
The amount in words needs two lines
Both amount-in-words lines are enabled. This matters more than it sounds: Arabic-market amounts written out in English run long, and a figure like AED 1,250,000 becomes a lot of words. With two lines active the text wraps onto the second line by itself rather than running off the edge of the cheque.
The A/C Payee crossing is vertical
Rather than the two short diagonal lines you see stamped in the top-left corner of an Indian cheque, this layout places a tall crossing block down the left side of the cheque. It is enabled by default, and it is driven by the A/C Payee tick box on the print window — so you control it per cheque, not per book.
Setting up Emirates NBD in ChequeMaster
- Create a bank account under Emirates NBD.
- Create a cheque book against that account and pick the Emirates NBD layout from the list. Enter your first cheque number and how many leaves are in the book.
- Print one cheque onto plain A4 and hold it against a real leaf up to the light.
- If everything is shifted uniformly, adjust the top and left margins in Settings. If individual fields are wrong, edit the layout instead.
The distinction in step 4 is the one that saves time. A uniform offset is almost always the printer, not the layout — different printers grip the paper differently, and a millimetre or two of consistent drift is normal. Only edit field positions when the fields are wrong relative to each other.
A note on language
Emirates NBD cheque stationery is printed bilingually, in Arabic and English. The details you fill in — payee, amount, date — are written in English, which is how cheques are normally issued by businesses in the UAE and what banks here expect. ChequeMaster prints those fields in English.
Other UAE banks
ChequeMaster includes layouts for Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (including its Islamic banking cheque), First Abu Dhabi Bank, Dubai Islamic Bank, Emirates Islamic, Arab Bank, Al Khaliji and Habib Bank AG Zurich. If your bank is not in the list, you can build the layout yourself from a scan of a cheque — see creating a cheque layout.
