The Province of New Brunswick does. That is how I remit my property taxes each spring.
Why not cash, then?
Not that it’s not prudent, but the warning seems to be more of a viral phenomenon than based on any actual cases or analysis by experts.
That’s been floating around for a few days. I’ve yet to see a good example of why someone changing a date I wrote from “20” to “20xx” would be of any real concern. I understand what they’re driving at, but I’m just not sure it’s that big of a deal.
It seems like less of a big deal than an attorney friend of mine who (this was back in the 80’s, before color printers/copiers/scanners) would only sign things in red ink. The reason being, if someone handed him a document with his signature in black, he knew it was a copy.
They should just have a “2”, this way it would last a whole thousand years. 
Ha!
I have a blank check from the 1920s, from Panhandle Bank, Texas. It has 192_ pre-printed, not just 19__. Of course, you had to write in your name and acct number, because they were just generic.
My check says “Two hundred fifteen and 17/100----------------dollars”. There is not enough room to write my own “dollars” and it wouldn’t make sense. I have never received a check from someone who did. I would take that bet but I don’t know how we’d settle it.
Yeah I think some non-Americans in other developed countries overestimate how conservative/backward the US system is and/or how totally electronic theirs is, though maybe based on comments by Americans on web.
If you deal just as consumer with big co’s in the US you can write next to zero checks nor will you commonly receive them. A couple of national publications (somewhat ironically) seem to only accept checks for subscriptions, can’t think of any other cases where I personally must write a check for consumer purchases from large organizations. More stuff comes in the form of paper check, rebates/refunds for example especially if it’s unsolicited. For example I mean if I cash in credit card rebate I’ll have it go electronically to my bank account, but if the insurance company pays a rebate on the premium by some law, they don’t have my bank acct info necessarily (I might pay them by credit card) so not sure what else they’d do but send me a paper check.
Anyway different story dealing as a small business, rental properties. I pay bills by debit card (or preferably credit card to get cash back) where possible, or Venmo to some service providers tuned into that. But a lot of other small businesses (contractors etc) want checks (or paper cash), and our tenants send us checks (or money orders). We just go with the flow there, rather than asking people to accept or send us electronic payments. It’s not really a material difference in cost or convenience IMO on the receiving end. On the paying end I’d rather get CC cash back when I pay, for anything personal or business, but obviously that costs the receiver, bigger businesses tend to accept that as greasing the wheels, smaller ones tend not to. Paying electronically from bank account rather than sending a check is less of a clear cut advantage IMO, besides ‘oh I/we are so modern’. It can make more than the cost of a stamp/envelope/check in interest to have a big property tax (or personal estimated tax) check postmarked by the deadline but cashed by the govt a week or 10 days later rather than have the money come out of an interest bearing account immediately when you do it electronically.
What would be the consequence of someone modifying the date like that?
Why not a check? I rarely see my gardener. He comes over when I’m at work. Two or three times a year he leaves an envelope under my doormat with an invoice (a small scrap of paper with what I owe) and I mail him a check.
How about any of these that popped up when I did a google image search for “handwritten check”?
Of course, it should be noted that it’s redundant, but still correct. I mean $135.17 can be written as “one hundred thirty five and 17/100 dollars” or “one hundred thirty five dollars and 17/100 dollars” or even “one hundred dollars and thirty dollars and five dollars and 17/100 dollars”. It’s all correct.
In the end, it’s just personal. As I was looking for the images, I noticed a lot of checks on auction sites written by Madonna, who writes the word dollar in the middle. I (and you) don’t do it. I stopped years and years ago when I realized it wasn’t necessary since the one at the end of the line took care of it. Besides, it’s not like anyone looks at it that closely anyway.
OK, not seeing him would make cash more difficult. I try to pay people running their own small businesses with cash to make things easier on them.
As someone on the receiving end, it’s a lot more expensive to take a credit card than anything else.
If 100 people owe me $1000 each for a total of $100,000…That would cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of $3000 in credit card processing fees. If they each wrote be a check, it would be something closer to $20.
That, of course, assumes no bounced checks. The bounced checks are the real issue. If a customer bounces a check, it costs us $25-$50 plus, lets say half of them, that we never do collect. Plus the time, and sometimes court costs, to recover what we can.
In the end, it just easier to not accept checks and adjust our prices accordingly.
In the above example, changing that from $1000 to $1040 brings back close to $1000 after our fees.
A big difference, however, is that I’m not in the rental business. If someone bounces a check at my store I’m typically SOL. When we still accepted checks, we recovered maybe half of the bounced checks. With rentals, you know exactly who they are, where they live, can evict them and wreck their credit. You have a lot more leverage than I do.
I remember asking my dad about this in the mid-60s. “What will they do when 2000 comes around?”
Well, since I have 15 handwritten checks sitting here, let me take a quick survey of them and report.
Eleven of them do not have a handwritten “dollars.” The other four do.
Believe it or not, I write a lot of cheques for the kids school and/or extra-curricular activities, etc… but also for several business accounts.
I am VP of our Little League association, on the executive for our Scouting group, the coach/manager for one of my boys hockey teams,and I was treasurer for our local community association so I have signing authority for each. Since all these organizations require 2 signatures for outgoing payments, by cheque is the only way this can be achieved.
Just last week, I was required to send a cheque and official roster through snail-mail for a hockey tournament in Nepean!? …OK, I didn’t have to mail it, but I wasn’t driving all the fucking way out to Barrhaven to drop it off 
I’m not surprised you could find examples. I’m not saying that nobody does it, but I would bet that most people don’t. If there were a way to prove it I would bet ten and 00/100 dollars 
Or a beer.
Back in 2009, I checked the statistics on my business with regards to checks. I was getting too many bad checks, yet the amount of total dollars by check wasn’t high enough to justify the cost of a check guarantee service.
I stopped taking checks. I figured I’d send the bad check writers to my competition! It worked out well for me.
I"m sure most people don’t, but I actually was a bit surprised at my small sample that 27% of those check writers did handwrite a “dollars” next to the amount. If you had asked me to guess, I would have guessed that maybe one or two check writers would write out “dollars.” I’ve always just written “Three hundred and 00/100 ---------” and never “dollars” on the check.
I’m pretty sure that means we agree then.
We used telecheck for a while and it was really expensive as well.
Now, during the time we used telecheck we also seemed to have a lot less bounced checks which means either telecheck was taking care of it behind the scenes and we never even knew it happened or people that were planning to write back checks wouldn’t bother using their checks at our store when they saw the telecheck signs.
IME trying to collect checks, about half of them would take care of the check within a day or so of me calling them. The ones that made good on them, some searching of their public court records revealed bouncing checks is sorta their thing.
A few years back, there was a kid in here, maybe in his 20’s with an older guy. They were shopping around the store and putting a lot more than seemed right in their cart. When they go to the checkout line, they wrote a check. As soon as they walked away I pulled up the kid’s (who wrote the check) court records and saw that he actually had a warrant issued, that day, for writing bad checks. I called my local PD to let them know about it, but they wouldn’t/couldn’t do anything about it. The warrant was from several counties away (and the customers were out of our jurisdiction already) and they can’t do anything about a ‘potentially’ bad check.
I deposited the check and waited for it to get returned. Now, before it was returned to me, another one got returned from another customer. She to seemed to make a living out of writing bad checks. In fact, I could see she had already spent 7 or 8 years in jail for it. As I was looking her up, I realized she was the mom of the kid the wrote the check the other day. Furthermore, they loved probably 45 minutes away. I’m guessing we were the closest place that accepts checks and hadn’t banned them already.
This was probably 3 years ago. The kid has since died (OD?) and the mom is still in jail. There was quite a long list of court cases before they were going to get to mine that I don’t think she’s even been in front of a judge for mine yet. I kinda doubt she ever will. Maybe, if I’m lucky, there’s a warrant for her from my city so if she ever does get out, she’ll get picked back up for it. But I doubt it.
That’s when we finally pulled the trigger on no longer accepting checks.
While I rarely write a personal check myself, my bank’s online bill pay service will issue paper checks to any payee who does not accept electronic payment. Tend to be smaller vendors like my landscape service, pool service, etc. My pool service issues invoices via Quickbooks and I can log into Quicken and pay electronically, but that is a pain. Not sure why the online bill pay service can’t let me pay electronically through Quickbooks (possible Quickbooks is their competitor).