ChequeMaster's settings split into two groups, and knowing which is which saves a lot of hunting. General settings apply everywhere. Default cheque book settings apply to one book, and override the general ones for cheques printed from it.

General settings

Case

Print in UPPERCASE or normal sentence case. Uppercase is the traditional choice on cheques and is marginally harder to alter convincingly after the fact.

Decimal digits

How many decimal places the amount carries. Two covers most currencies. Set it to three for the Kuwaiti dinar, Bahraini dinar and Omani rial, which are subdivided into 1,000 — a cheque for KWD 1.250 is one dinar and 250 fils, and printing it as 1.25 is wrong.

Thousand separators

Whether 1250000 prints as 1,250,000. On by default, and worth leaving on — grouped digits are markedly harder to misread across a teller counter.

Lakh or million

This one changes the words, not the figures. With lakh, 1250000 becomes Twelve Lakh Fifty Thousand. With million, the same figure becomes One Million Two Hundred Fifty Thousand.

Match the convention your bank and payees actually use: the lakh and crore system in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka; millions in the Gulf and most other markets.

Tamper-proof marks

Append or prepend ** around the amount in words. The point is to fill the empty space after the text so nobody can add words to the end of a written amount. Cheap, and standard practice for good reason.

Currency

Drives the amount-to-words conversion — which currency name is written out and what the subunit is called. Set at installation and changeable here.

Date format

Match your cheque's printed format. Most cheques in India and the Gulf expect DD/MM/YYYY, and layouts carry their own expected format too.

Enable Silent Print

Whether printing asks which printer to use. Covered in changing the printer.

Margins and print direction

Top and left margin offsets in millimetres, plus vertical and horizontal print direction. These correct for how your specific printer grips the paper. See fixing alignment before changing them.

Default cheque book settings

Set per book, on the cheque book's own page:

  • Print Language — the language for this book's cheques.
  • A/C Payee Text — the wording inside the crossing, typically A/C Payee or Account Payee Only.
  • Bearer Text — the bearer wording. Where you issue crossed cheques only, this can stay off.
  • Not Above Text — the ceiling line, as in Not above Rs. 50,000.

Click Save Settings after editing. All four are defaults you can still override on an individual cheque.

Get these right before your first real run

Every one of these affects what lands on the paper. Ten minutes here is cheaper than a spoiled cheque book — particularly the decimal digits and the lakh/million choice, which are easy to overlook and produce cheques that are wrong rather than merely ugly.