Printable Checks

Printable Checks At Home

Banks and check ordering companies sell preprinted checks to people. There are some hidden costs, such as waiting for the checks to arrive, spending time browsing their selections, and paying for the premium of a personalized design. For these reasons people turn to printable checks.

If you are thinking about printing your own personal or business checkbooks at home, you already know that banks accept checks not printed by themselves but nevertheless draw from your account at their branches. People print their own for many reasons, to personalize, to make more convenient, and to reduce costs.

Requirements: Software, Printer, and Magnetic Ink

In order to print computer checks, you will need three essential ingredients: software for the computer, a printer, and magnetic ink.

Computer Software

For the software, we list just three popular ones but there are many others: take a look at VersaCheck Gold, Checksoft 2010, and a product from the personal finance experts Quicken. Each one will allow basic features of creating printable checks like choosing templates, adding graphics, customizing fonts, etc. Most of them also allow you to do basic home finance activities like maintaining an account balance, keeping track of outgoing payments, printing reports etc.

Printer

Obviously you will need a printer in order to make printable checks. You have really two choices. You can go with a specialized type of printer known as a MICR printer, which stands for magnetic ink character recognition. This printer is set up to print in magnetic ink which is recognized by automated processing systems at all or most major banks. Although it is possible to submit a check printed without magnetic ink, banking industry organizations strongly caution against it for fear of gumming up and reducing the efficient flow of processing at the banks. If you do not want to purchase a specialized MICR printer, check out the next paragraph.

Magnetic Ink or Toner

Because of high demand for printable checks, even without a specialized MICR printer, one can turn to standard printers that accept MICR toner or ink cartridges. Famous brands which have this capability include Lexmark and HP. However, to keep your costs low, you should take a look at third party manufacturers of magnetic toner and ink cartridges which make OEM compatible products.

Printable Checkbook Register

One often overlooked benefit of making your own financial products is that you have better control over record keeping like the checkbook register. Most preprinted checks bought from the bank or other companies come with a register for keeping track of incoming and outgoing payments. The three brands of software described above give you the capability to print out your own, customizable checkbook register. There are a number of other software products that do the same.