I have tried looking through previous posts to see if this question has been asked. I'm surprised that I couldn't find reference to it as I would think it was a fairly common. Either that or I have missed something very basic.

When entering payments into a "manual" cheque batch, we currently can only use numeric "cheque numbers". However, electronic payments often have alphanumeric reference numbers. Is there any way to enter alphanumeric reference numbers into the cheque number field? We currently either strip all the letters out of the reference number or use a numeric date (03192016) instead.