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Has your business received a check payment from one or more customers? As a business owner, most of your payments will probably come in the form of credit card or debit card transactions. Occasionally, however, a customer may ask to pay with a check. But if you aren’t able to process check payments, the customer could leave your business for a competitor. Using the Quickbooks Desktop accounting software, you can easily process and record check payments in just a few simple steps.

What You’ll Need

To process check payments, you’ll need Quickbooks Desktop. Unfortunately, Quickbooks Online — the cloud-based version of Intuit’s accounting software — doesn’t offer check processing. You’ll only find this feature available in the standalone version, Quickbooks Desktop.

In addition to Quickbooks Desktop, you’ll also need a scanner. According to Intuit, processing check payments requires a TWAIN-complaint scanner. A type of application programming interface (API) TWAIN governs the communications between computer software and digital imaging devices, including scanners. Assuming you have Quickbooks Desktop, as well as a TWAIN-compliant scanner, you can process and record check payments.

Steps to Processing Check Payments

When you’re ready to process a check payment, log in to Quickbooks Desktop and click the “Customers” menu, followed by “Receive Payments.” Upon doing so, you should see a new “Receive Payments” window on screen. In this window, click the “Scan Checks” option. Quickbooks will prompt you with a warning asking if you’d like to process, at which point you can choose “Yes.”

You can now proceed to scan the check by placing it in your scanner and clicking the “scan” button. After the check has finished scanning, Quickbooks will automatically populate several fields in the “Verify Scanned Check Information” window, which you should double check to ensure it’s accurate. If any of the information is wrong, you’ll need to manually fix it. Quickbooks does a pretty good job at accurately reading scanned checks, but errors can and do occur.

After double checking the information in the “Verify Scanned Check Information,” you’ll have the option of either recording or skipping the payment. To record the check payment, choose the option to record as “Receive Payment,” after which you can apply it to an invoice or sales receipt. If you have multiple check payments, repeat these steps for each one. When finished, click the button titled “Send Checks for Processing.”

Did this tutorial work for you? Let us know in the comments section below!