All Canadian business cheques should conform with the new specifications as outlined in CPA Standard 006, Part A by December 31, 2006.

What does this mean to you? In Preparation for New Clearing Process we would encourage you visit the Canadian Payments Association website and review the changes with your cheque form provider to ensure that the cheque stock you are presently using conforms to the new standards.

You may also find that your present cheque print format will need to be appended to comply with the new regulations (BAS 8,7,5,1). For example the adoption of a numeric date field in one of three specified formats (YYYYMMDD, MMDDYYYY or DDMMYYYY). These date fields have been defined in the module and include:

C-N_MONTHDATE
C-DAYDATE
C-F_YEARDATE

Field indicators must also be printed below the date field to indicate which format is being used. Bilingual date field indicators are accommodated for cheques using the ISO date format (YYYYMMDD): This is best addressed by your cheque form provider.

For more information visit:

http://www.cdnpay.ca/publications/cheque_specifications.asp