Cheques: still here, still manageable
Canadian B2B still writes cheques, so the books need to treat them as first-class: issued is not cleared, and post-dated is not money yet.
Issued vs cleared
A cheque reduces your ledger bank balance when issued, but the bank's balance only when cashed. The gap — outstanding cheques — is normal, and the bank reconciliation is where it is proven rather than feared.
Post-dated cheques
A PDC is a promise with a date. Track it to maturity; recording it as cash today misstates both parties. SeroBooks keeps PDCs visible with their dates until they become real.
Voiding properly
A voided cheque is an audited event, not a deleted row — the number sequence stays complete, which is exactly what a bank or auditor checks first.
A cheque is not money yet
Cheques settle days after they are written, which means a cheque received is a promise and a cheque written is a future withdrawal. Books that treat both as instant cash produce a bank position that is confidently wrong for most of every month.
Post-dated cheques make the point sharper: they are promises with a date attached, and treating them as today's money is how a float disappears.
Record the method honestly
Recording a cheque as cash is a small convenience that costs twice: the drawer count is wrong tonight, and the post-dated tracking is gone entirely. The method is data the rest of the ledger relies on.
Reconcile the cheque register against the bank rather than against the till — the gap between the two is precisely the uncleared cheques.
What SeroBooks does with this
The Cheques register carries both directions with received, paid-out and post-dated totals, filterable by direction and date window. Cheques written in a payment run land there automatically, numbered in sequence.
Each row names the party, the document or account it settled and the location, so a cheque is never an orphan number.
See it in your own numbers.
Free to start, on Windows, Mac, iPad and Android. No credit card.