Lesson 5 — Post-dated cheques, where the date is a lock
A post-dated cheque is a cheque with a date the bank will refuse to look past, so the module refuses too.
The practice this answers. Post-dated cheques are how a great deal of UAE business is financed, and their date is the whole agreement. Presenting one early is not a clerical shortcut — it breaks the arrangement you made with the customer, and it usually comes back. The commercial protection here is simply that nobody can do it by accident.
The mental model. The date is a lock on the deposit, not a note on a screen. Post-dated cheques are blocked from deposit until their date. The lock has exactly one key: a manager can allow an early deposit, which means the decision to break a dated arrangement is taken by someone whose job that is, and it is taken deliberately.
Who is allowed to do what. Two groups under Odoone Cheques control access, and you assign them on each user's form under the Access Rights tab.
| Group | What it can do |
|---|---|
| User | Register, deposit and process cheques day to day |
| Manager | Everything a user can do, plus cheque templates, checkbooks and configuration — and permitting an early deposit |
Seeing the dates coming. Three views exist so that no cheque reaches its date unnoticed. PDC aging buckets your held post-dated cheques by how far away their dates are, which is a cash-flow forecast made of paper you already hold. The due-date calendar puts every cheque on the day it is due, so a deposit run can be planned rather than remembered. And Due-notice days on the settings page decides how many days before a cheque's due date you want to be reminded.
The click path. Open Accounting → Cheques → Received Cheques and try to deposit a cheque before its date. The deposit is refused, and it stays refused for a user. A manager can permit the early deposit from the same screen — worth doing only when the customer has agreed, which is a conversation rather than a click.
The worked example. Cheque 004512 arrives on 18 August 2026 dated 15 October 2026. For fifty-eight days it sits In Wallet, its AED 120,000.00 held in PDC Receivable, appearing in the PDC aging report and on the due-date calendar for 15 October 2026. With Due-notice days set, the reminder arrives before the date rather than after it, and the cheque is deposited on the day it becomes depositable.
The failure mode. Somebody in the finance team can see cheques but cannot deposit an early one, and concludes the module is broken. They are in the User group, which is correct — early deposit is a manager decision. If they genuinely need the wider access, add the Manager group on their user form; if they do not, route the request to a manager instead, which is what the split exists for.