Editing check format

[N B Day]

On Thu, 2008-04-24 at 00:48 +1000, Doug Laidlaw wrote:

<Some stuff trimmed>
> > Oh?  How is it different?
> 
> You write "100 dollars 45/100"
> 
> Australian Quicken writes "100 dollars and 45 cents."   We brought in decimal 
> currency in 1966, and I think that the official guidelines then 
> specified "100 dollars 45."   That is how I hand-write checks.  We don't use 
> the fraction convention.  It would be accepted, but it looks foreign, like 
> something from a U.S.  Windows 3 vintage shareware package.  I think that a 
> program as full-featured as Gnucash should look professional, no matter what 
> country uses it.    

I too would like an easy way to change the default check writing
behavior.  When I was *a lot* younger I worked in NZ for an insurance
company where we hand wrote checks ("cheques") for claims payments.
Decimal currency had been introduced there so recently before that most
older people mentally calculated in lsd and converted.  

I was taught there to write checks as "one-hundred dollars and
forty-five cents", or "one-hundred dollars only" if there were no cents
involved.  I've always thought that this was far clearer and less
error-prone than the American convention which is "one-hundred and
45/100 dollars," which sounds really stupid if you sound it out (but of
course you don't actually have to write "dollars" on most checks).  

I've done it the NZ way(or maybe it is just the Prudential way) ever
since on the few occasions I hand-write a check and always hated that
Quicken used the American format both for the amount in words and the
date (about which I have many horror stories after a long working life
in different countries with different conventions).  I'm a recent
convert to Gnucash so I haven't needed to print a check yet (thanks to
free bill-pay at my bank).  It *would* be nice though to have a simple
way to tailor the check format to my own peculiar standard.


-- 
N. B. Day
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