CPA 006 Overview - What Do I Look For

by Les C. Cseh, ASAP Cheques, Forms & Supplies
revised August 21, 2006

Size Matters

For business cheques, the maximum depth (height) has been increased to 3 3/4" (9.53 cm), although the vast majority do not exceed 3 1/2" (8.89 cm).

For personal cheques, the minimum length (width) has been increased to 6 1/4" (15.88 cm). This should only affect those Canadians who order personal cheques from U.S. cheque printers, who offer hundreds of themes at very low prices. Even if American cheque printers changed their designs to accommodate the CPA 006 standards, it is unlikely they would also increase the width of their 6" cheques to 6 1/4".

Areas Of Interest

Before detailing what to look for on the front and back of cheques, it is important to understand what the standards refer to as "Areas Of Interest". In addition to scanning an image of the entire front and back of each cheque, it is critical that the Areas Of Interest are located and formatted precisely according to the standards to aid in automatic recognition, and for manual processing as well.

On the front of the cheque, the Areas Of Interest are: Date Field, Payee Name Line, Amount In Numbers, Amount In Words, Financial Institution Name, Signature Line(s) and the MICR Clear Band (the bottom 5/8" (1.59 cm) of every cheque, where the cheque number, financial institution and branch, and account number are encoded using Magnetic Ink Character Recognition numbers and symbols).

On the back of the cheque, the Areas Of Interest are the Teller Stamp Box, Endorsement Area, Verification Phrase and the bottom 1" (2.54 cm) of the cheque.

Originally, the standards required a 1/4" (0.635 cm) "clear area" around each Area Of Interest (except for the MICR Clear Band and the bottom 1" on the back of the cheque which already includes this 1/4" (0.635 cm) clear area). However, due to the limited space available on some cheques, this can be as reduced to as little as .1" (0.25 cm).