Lesson 8 — Issued cheques, checkbooks and Void/Stop
Now turn the direction around. The paper is yours, the numbering is yours, and the discipline is different.
The practice this answers. A cheque leaf is a numbered, negotiable document. A supplier holding leaf 000149 will present it eventually, and a company that cannot say what leaf 000149 was for, or that has used the number twice, has a control problem long before it has an accounting problem.
The mental model. An issued cheque is drawn on one of your numbered checkbook leaves, printed on the real cheque, and then Cleared, Voided through stop-payment, or Bounced. Its value waits in Cheques Payable from the moment you issue it until the bank debits your account, which is the mirror image of Lesson 1: your balance does not drop the moment you write a cheque, because the money has not left yet.
Checkbooks, and the leaf the module hands you. Open Accounting → Cheques → Checkbooks and register each physical checkbook: the bank account it belongs to, its first and last leaf numbers, and its status. When you issue a cheque the module hands you the next unused leaf, so numbering stays continuous and no leaf is used twice. That is the whole control, and it works because the register exists — an unregistered checkbook cannot hand you anything.
Void and Stop are one button and two outcomes. Click Void / Stop, enter the stop-payment or spoiled-leaf reason, and what happens next depends on what the cheque already is.
| What you are voiding | What the module records | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A draft leaf | Spoiled, with no entry | Nothing was ever issued, so no value moved and there is nothing to reverse |
| An issued cheque | Cancelled or reversed | Value was booked to Cheques Payable, so the entry has to be undone rather than forgotten |
Auto-clear, and when to leave it off. Auto-clear issued cheques optionally lets issued cheques clear automatically on their due date instead of waiting for a manual step. It is convenient for suppliers who bank on time and misleading for those who do not, because a cheque marked cleared on its date is a claim about the bank rather than a fact from it. Leave it off if your bank statement is the record you trust, which is the same instinct as reconciliation mode in Lesson 3.
The click path. Open Accounting → Cheques → Issued Cheques, or register the vendor payment with the Cheque (Issued) method and let the instrument be created for you. To print, use Print Cheques from a single cheque, or select several in the Issued list and choose it from the ⚙ Action menu; the wizard arrives with the cheques pre-selected.
The worked example. Gulf Fittings Trading LLC pays Falcon Aluminium Trading LLC AED 68,500.00 by cheque. The module hands over leaf 000149 from the checkbook running 000101 to 000200, the value waits in Cheques Payable, and the bank balance is unchanged until the supplier presents it. A leaf jams in the printer and is destroyed: void it while it is still a draft leaf, record it as spoiled, and no entry is made — the checkbook simply moves to 000150.
The failure mode. The mistake is expecting Void to behave the same way twice. Voiding a spoiled draft leaf posts nothing, which surprises nobody; voiding a cheque already issued and printed must unwind an entry, because value was already sitting in Cheques Payable. If a supplier says a cheque has been lost, treat it as a stop-payment on an issued cheque and expect the reversal, then issue the replacement on the next leaf rather than reusing the number.