Re: Cheque printing direct from the iSeries.

http://www.acom.com/iseries/ezpm400.html


Eduard Sluis wrote:

Thanks Wayne (and al the others),

Our customers are banks.

Normally we do not have to do this Cheque thing because cheques are more and 
more a thing of the past.
In this case it is not a very big bank and because of lack of a national 
clearing system they have an considerable total of cheques to print.
Not only Cheques 'on us' but also cheques issued for other banks they have 
relations with (EURO cheques on the name of ABN-AMRO Amsterdam, USD cheques on 
the name of 'Bank of America' NewYork, JPY cheques on the name of Bank of 
Tokio, etc).
Those will have different formats and will be in different ways pre printed.
Some will be pre numbered other happily not (generating/administrating your own 
numbers is far simpler than having someone to enter a number).
I guess we will have to use laser printers with sufficient tray's that are AFP 
capable.
Oops, that opens up a lot of new challenges.
- AFP printing (never done)(longtime ago played a bit with PCL5 escape codes).
- All kind of spoolfile management (This user this printer, This Printerfile 
this tray), Vaguely know how to do.

Any suggestion that could make life easier?

Kind regards,

Eduard Sluis.

----- Original Message ----
From: Wayne McAlpine <wayne.mcalpine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 12:30:30 PM
Subject: Re: Cheque printing direct from the iSeries.

There are turnkey solutions out there from vendors like Acom that produce the entire check on blank check stock. They use a special laser printers that support MICR (magnetic ink character recognition?) printing. Many stock printers can be converted to print MICR. Typically the checks are printed on stock that includes a self mailer. These require a separate device to fold and seal the envelope. You've seen these checks with the perforated edges that have to be torn off to open it.

The other alternative is to roll your own and print to pre-printed and numbered checks. Typically these are continuous form checks that are printed on an impact dot-matrix or band printer. The check forms can be purchased in several configurations, i.e., carbon copies, These checks can be burst by hand or by machine and processed by normal mailroom folder/inserter machines. There is RPG shareware available to produce the spelled-out amount on the check face.

Typically the MICR checks are used for high-volume processing and the impact printers for more moderate operations.

But the best way to handle payment processing is to use EFT. Your bank can easily set you up to upload your data and they will do the funds transfer for you, usually for far less than what it would cost to produce paper checks. Our check printing project was shelved permanently once we started looking into EFT.

Hope this helps as a starting point.

Wayne



Eduard Sluis wrote:

Dear all,

For one of our customers we are to print cheques direct on a cheque printer.

This Cheque printing requires a bit more than normal printing because we want 
to be damn sure that the cheque is printed and is printed only once and ....?!

I have to assume that we are not the first ones to do so and that perhaps this is a very common thing to do.

What we would like to know is:
- Are tools available to do this?
- What kind of printers are suitable?
- Are there routines available to use with specific printers?
- Anything to think about we might overlook?
- Any experience that could help us!!

Any help/response appreciated.

Kind regards,
Eduard Sluis.