Lesson 2 — Three interim accounts and the Cheque Operations journal
There are exactly three waits in the life of a cheque, so there are exactly three accounts.
The practice this answers. A cheque you are holding, a cheque the bank is collecting and a cheque you have written are three different risks with three different owners. Merge them into one account and the balance you get is an average of unrelated things — useless for a conversation with a customer, a bank or an auditor.
The three accounts. They are created for you on install, and you only change them if your chart of accounts requires specific codes.
| Interim account | What it holds | Whose promise it is |
|---|---|---|
| PDC Receivable | Post-dated customer cheques you are holding | The customer's, and the date has not arrived |
| Cheques Under Collection | Cheques you have deposited that the bank has not yet cleared | The bank's, and it is being processed |
| Cheques Payable | Cheques you have issued that have not yet been debited from your account | Yours, and the supplier has not yet presented it |
The journal that records them. The Cheque Operations journal records the interim entries for every lifecycle step. A default journal is created on install, and you can point the setting at a different journal if your accounting team prefers. Keeping cheque movements in their own journal is what lets you read a month of cheque activity without wading through every other posting.
What install puts in place. For every company that already has a chart of accounts, the module creates the three interim accounts and the Cheque Operations journal automatically. Two payment methods — Cheque (Received) and Cheque (Issued) — become available on your bank journals, and two security groups are added so you can control who sees cheques and who manages them. There is no separate subscription and no second app to buy: the module depends only on the standard account app, and the only external piece is the Python library num2words, which spells amounts in words.
The click path. Open Invoicing → Configuration → Settings and scroll to the Odoone Cheque Management section. Everything the module needs is on this one page, split into an Interim Accounts block and a Clearing & Alerts block. Read the three account fields first and check they point at accounts your chart actually uses.
The worked example. Cheque 004512 is post-dated to 15 October 2026, so on 18 August 2026 its AED 120,000.00 sits in PDC Receivable and nowhere else. Cheques Under Collection is empty, because nothing has been deposited. Cheques Payable is empty, because you have not written anything. One glance at three balances tells you the whole cheque position of the company.
The failure mode. If the settings page shows no interim accounts and no Cheque Operations journal, the company had no chart of accounts at the moment the module installed, so there was nothing for it to create them against. Configure the chart of accounts, then either set the three accounts and the journal by hand on the settings page or reinstall the module and let it seed them. Do not work around it by pointing the fields at the bank account — that puts every cheque straight into the bank balance and undoes Lesson 1.