Post-dated Cheques

01

A held cheque is not cash

A drawer of paper must never show up as bank balance. A cheque you hold sits in Cheques Under Collection — برسم التحصيل — and one you wrote sits in post-dated payables, and neither touches a bank account until the bank says it did. The balance sheet finally reads the way the office already thinks.

02

The date is the document

Every screen is ordered by due date, because that is the only thing that says when paper becomes money. Clearing in seven days, the rest of this month, next month, later — and the one that quietly costs the most: a cheque whose date has gone by while it sat in the drawer, unbanked.

03

Bounced, and then what

A returned cheque reverses its own settlement, posts the bank charge, puts the amount back on the customer, and can be recharged to them in the same entry. Then it is replaced by a new cheque linked to the old one in both directions, so the chain reads from either end — and the customer's record says how many times this has happened before.

04

The deposit slip, and the credit it became

Pick the cheques out of the drawer, print a bilingual slip, take it to the branch — then find the credit on the statement. One credit for a slip of fifteen; the one cheque that came back is marked from its own row, which is how a bounce stops going unnoticed for a month.

05

Your own cheque book, counted

A book per account with a number range and a next leaf. The number comes off the book, so the same cheque number cannot go out twice, a gap in the sequence is refused with the reason, and the book says it is running low before it runs out — because a new one takes days and a dated cheque does not wait.

06

And ours, on the other side

Every cheque you wrote is a payment the account has to be funded for on a date somebody chose months ago. The register holds them too, with what each account is committed to, and the morning watcher says what has to be in the bank before the phone rings.