Lesson 1 — What it changes, and what it deliberately leaves alone
Start with the sentence that prevents the most confusion: this does not replace the cheque flow you already use. It plugs into the same Print Checks button and the same prenumbered-checks flow, and changes only how the leaf is drawn.
What the leaf demands of you. A cheque is not a report. It is a payment instrument that a bank's clearing machinery has to read, and the paper is the bank's — already printed, already numbered. Everything that makes it a cheque is on that paper before your printer touches it: the leaf number, the bank's own content, and the magnetic line along the foot. So the whole task is to place a handful of fields into the gaps the bank left, in the right places, without disturbing anything the bank put there first. That is a measuring job, which is why this module works in millimetres.
The mental model. Nothing about the way you pay a supplier changes. You register the payment with the cheque payment method as usual and press Print Checks, and the payments render onto the selected template through the Print Studio engine, ready to print on your pre-printed leaves. One thing is replaced, and only one: the fixed, hard-coded layout that decided where each field landed. In its place is a millimetre-precise template you can design and calibrate per bank.
The click path. Two settings, in this order, and the second is the one people forget.
- Open Invoicing (or Accounting) → Configuration → Settings and set Check Layout to Odoone Print Studio. Set it company-wide, or set it on a single bank journal if only one of your banks prints this way.
- Point the journal — or the company — at a cheque template. The Generic UAE cheque preset works out of the box, so a first test needs no design work at all.
- Print the template's calibration page before you print on a real leaf, against the printer and the tray you will actually use. Lesson 4 is that step in full.
What changes and what does not. Read the table as a fence. Everything on the left is this module's business; everything on the right stays exactly where it was.
| What this module changes | What it leaves alone |
|---|---|
| How the leaf is drawn — where every field lands, in millimetres | The Print Checks button and the prenumbered-checks flow |
| The layout, per bank and per journal | How a payment to a supplier is registered |
| The language the amount in words is written in | The numbering of your pre-printed leaves |
| Printer alignment, through a calibration profile | The accounting behind the cheque |
Read the right-hand column twice. It is a list of the things people expect a printing module to disturb, and the reason it disturbs none of them is that it is not a new cheque flow — it is a new way of drawing one leaf.
The failure mode. Two messages account for nearly every failed first attempt, and both are configuration rather than fault. If Print Checks reports no layout, the Check Layout is not set to Odoone Print Studio — go back to the first step. If it reports no template, none is set on the journal or the company; set one there, or keep the Generic preset. Neither message means something is missing from the software.