New specification for Canadian cheques

[Gilles Gariepy]

Derek,

I have read through some of the documentation online and I spoke with my
cheque company (Davis& Henderson). My understanding is that for manual
cheques, the cheque provider is responsible for including the field
indicators. However for business cheques, which is the type of cheques used
by "electronic chequebooks" like Quicken and gnucash, it is the
responsibility of the software to put the field indicators below the
formatted date.

The actual spec are here: http://www.cdnpay.ca/rules/acss_standards_006.asp

You can download the pdf file (I didn't want to attach it). Pages 19 through
29 seem relevant to the overall process but pages 24 - 26 deal specifically
with the date fields.

I am happy to help out with this but I am afraid that I will not be of any
use when(if) it comes down to writing code.

Thanks
Gilles



On 2/26/07 5:08 PM, "Derek Atkins" <warlord at MIT.EDU> wrote:

> Quoting Gilles Gariepy <gariepy.g at videotron.ca>:
> 
>> 
>> 
>> Effective June 30th, 2007, all Canadian cheques must conform to new,
>> standardised specifications as outlined at
>> http://www.cdnpay.ca/news/new_cheque_specs.asp . Most of the changes can be
>> accommodated with the custom setting in gnucash. However, there is one
>> specification that I have not figured out how to comply with.
>> 
>> It states that ³Field indicators must be printed below the date on all
>> cheques in 6-8pt font in one of three
>> available formats: YYYYMMDD, DDMMYYYY or MMDDYYYY.²
>> 
>> Does anyone have any ideas if this can be achieved ³locally² or does this
>> require changes to gnucash?
> 
> Looking at the sample, it looks like all we really have to do is have a
> new date format that fits your output requirements.  The "field indicators"
> should already be on the raw cheque stock so we shouldn't have to print
> those ourselves.
> 
> HOWEVER I do think it would require a change to the code to actually print
> the date format as you need with the proper spacing.
> 
>> Thanks
>> Gilles
> 
> -derek
> 
> --
>        Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>        Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>        URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>        warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
>