I have adjusted our check template to suit our new pre-printed check stock. Viewing the template in the "Check Designer" module in A/P, everything looks fine and lines up when printed on a sample check. When I try to print an actual check in A/P using the new template, it looks nothing like the one that I have made adjustments to. The paper is selected as letter size in the Maintaining Specifications section of A/P . Any suggestions on what I am doing wrong??

Hi cclory

The check spec Titles are what appear when printing checks. You may have two different check specs with the same title and are picking the wrong one by accident. Try using the spec designer to change the title of your check spec for pre-printed stock. Open the spec file and from File / Specification Options, you should ensure that the Title here is unique. Save your change and give it another try.

Did that, it is a very unique name, there is no other spec with this name.

Hello:

Is the problem that an advice is printing where the cheque should print and vice versa?

If so, you should open the cheque spec file and go to File | Specification Options to indicate the position of the advices and the cheque. In layout mode, you will always see Advice-Cheque-Advice but you can control where they actually print.

Further to Support's suggestion, I would choose File | Open and confirm that there isn't another cheque with the same Title.

No, it seems that the two top advice sections are not lined up, which is pushing the cheque section on to another page. But when you look at the template in the Specs it is perfect.

Are you printing checks to a laser printer or a dot-matrix printer? What is the layout of your form (adv/adv/check or check/adv/adv or another)? I presume it's adv/adv/check.

It may be that you have too many detail lines reserved for your advice, and based on the section sizes, the advice sections as a whole are too big and thus your check goes to the top of the second page. The solution in this case is to edit the File / Specification Options and reduce the Max Details number. You can preview the spec within the designer to ensure that everything fits on one page, and then print to paper to ensure that it aligns with your pre-printed check form.

If you have a laser printer, there is a top margin reserved by the laster printer driver. It may be that you have a pre-printed form that has information you want to print in, within the laser printer margin. You might be able to nudge fields higher within the first advice section (highlight and use the cursor key to move up), even so that they are partially underneath the advice 'grey' section indicator. But there are no guarantees that you can get the alignment you desire - the solution may also mean that your forms won't work on your printer due to the printer's margin.

You should verify that all the section heights (header, detail and footer) for your advices indeed match your pre-printed form.

The layout is adv/adv/check. What should I lower the Max Details number to? It is at 12 now.

Start by going one lower - in your case, 11. The end result should be that your advice information all still aligns, and is not too big to push the check to the next page.

If this causes information to print too high, then you may need to tweak the advice section heights in order to get everything properly aligned.

You'll know this is the problem if your current problem has the first advice header aligning properly but the first advice footer is printing too low. This pushes down the second advice to also be mis-aligned and printing too low.

If this is not the particular printing problem, could you explain in a little more detail what portions of the check (and advices) are printing correctly - if any - and where the printing alignment goes awry? That will help us to give more specific information to identify the problem.

This was very helpful! I feel like I am on the right track now. I have printed a cheque and everything is lining up, but now in advice #2 the headings are not showing up ie; invoice#, date, reference, description, net amt paid, but it is on the template and I do not have the option to manipulate the text for advice #2 on the template. Any suggestions on how to get these to print on the cheque? Also adding divider lines to seperate the columns in the advices, I cannot seem to get them to work for me, advice #2 is fine, but advice #1 has no divider lines and when I try to add them the just come out broken lines. I have tried the fit to section option, but that just brings the line to the very top of the advice (not what I want).

Glad that there is progress!

From the File / Specifications screen, can you confirm which advice section(s) are selected to print? You could choose Advice 1 twice, or each of Advice 1 and Advice 2, or Advice 2 twice. If you happened to pick the same Advice twice, then any changes you made to the 'other advice' sections on the spec would have no influence when printing, as they have not been chosen to print.

Or if you have chosen both Advice 1 and 2 to print, ensure that the desired fields/labels exist in the respective 'advice 2' header, detail or footer sections. In this case, you can manipulate all fields/labels independantly.

For dividing vertical lines, you should insert them so that the top of each line is in the detail section, and then format to 'fit to section' as you indicated. The location of the top of the line indicates what section it 'belongs' to. If the top exists in an advice header section and you 'fit to section', indeed it will fit to that section.

If your spec contains two different detail section types (for payments and for cash invoices), you need to insert vertical lines and 'fit to section' for both. Otherwise when you preview within the designer, it will appear as if there are gaps in the detail section of the advice. Printing live checks will choose one detail section or the other (whichever is applicable) and ignore the other.

I got the lines no problem, but my column headings are still not printing. They show on the template in the Check Designer, and they are shown on the preview when I preview my check to be printed, but when the actual check is printed it is not there.

If Previewing the check works, but print to paper does not, then that doesn't make logical sense. What section did you specify the column headings to print in? Were these labels nudged under a section header?

The section that these headings are in are Advice header-Advice 1. The headings show on the screen in both the check designer and the check preview just before I actually print a check, but when it comes through the printer, no headings are in the middle advice. The labels are not nudged under a section, there is plenty of space between the Advice header-Advice 1 and Advice detail-Advice 1-Advice body detail.

You didn't indicate whether you have the advice 1 section repeated on your check spec, or if you have both advice 1 and advice 2 selected. If you get the column headings on one advice but not the other, I presume that the latter case is the situation.

If indeed you have both advice 1 and advice 2 selected to print on your check, then you have to ensure that the column headings are also entered into the Advice 2 Header section. Whatever you have in the first advice sections will have no influence in the second advice sections, and vice versa.

Either copy and paste the desired information from the advice 1 header to the advice 2 header, or insert them manually.

Sorry, I have selected both Advice 1 and Advice 2 to print on my cheque, as they are different in appearance. I have deleted the column headings in advice 1 and pasted the same columns headings from advice 2 onto advice 1, and still they are showing in the template, the check preview but not on the check itself.

If you want both advice 1 and 2 to print on your check, you should not have deleted the column headings from the first header. You need them on both.

If you are overlapping other objects with your column headings (such as shaded rectangles), ensure that the text is 'on top'. You might have to 'bring to front' the text or 'send to back' any overlapping objects.

Perhaps take a look at one of the sample specifications that have 2 different advices and see how these are laid out. Maybe even try printing with a sample spec to determine whether your spec file or the printer is the cause of the problem.

Perfection!!!! Finally got it, thank you so much!

My cheques have been printing perfectly in my normal cheque runs, but now when I want to print a manual cheque the format is completely off. The correct specs are chosen for the Manual cheque, everything seems to be correct. Do you know any reason why this might be happening?

When you create a manual check batch, are the transactions Payments or are they Cash Invoices? If Payments, then everything should be identical to printing checks via the Print/Post Checks and Advices function.

If you are entering Cash Invoices, then there is a different detail section type that is required for your check specification. It is the 'Advice body - Cash' section that prints cash invoice distributions. This is different than the 'Advice body - detail' section that prints paid invoices for Payment checks.

If you want to use the same spec for printing cash invoice-related checks as for payments, then both detail sections need to be on the spec. Ensure that the section height of the 'advice body - cash' is the same as the 'advice body - detail' so that the formatting remains the same. And you can only use the 'G codes' for printing information in the advice - this will be information such as the distribution code, GL account, description and tax information.