A stop payment instruction tells your bank to refuse a cheque you have written. It is what you use when a cheque is lost, stolen, issued in error, or when a deal falls through after you have handed it over.
How to do it
- Contact your bank immediately — through net banking, the app, or the branch, whichever is fastest.
- Give the cheque number, and usually the date, payee and amount.
- Pay the fee. Most banks charge for a stop payment.
- Get confirmation and keep it.
Speed is the whole thing
A stop payment only works before the cheque is paid. Once the bank has honoured it, the money is gone and you are into a dispute rather than a stop.
This is why knowing your cheque details matters — hunting for a cheque number while the cheque is in transit is time you do not have. If your cheques are recorded, the number is a search away. See reports and advanced search.
Stopping a range
If a whole cheque book is lost or stolen, banks can usually stop a range of numbers rather than one. Report it as a lost book rather than as individual cheques — and this is a case where knowing the exact range in the book is genuinely useful, which it will be if you recorded it when you set the book up.
It does not cancel the debt
Worth being clear about. Stopping a cheque prevents that payment; it does not settle whatever the cheque was for. If you owed the money, you still owe it, and stopping a cheque without cause can put you in breach of an agreement.
Stop payment is for lost, stolen or genuinely mistaken cheques. Using it to escape a payment you simply do not want to make is a different matter and can have legal consequences.
Record it
Mark the cheque as Stopped Payment in your records — it is one of ChequeMaster's cheque statuses. The leaf is then accounted for, which matters when someone later asks why cheque 150347 never cleared.
