MSD Checking
Windows desktop application Licensed, in production

Check printing for accounting offices

A spreadsheet goes in.
Signed checks come out.

An accounting office with a list of payees should not be hand-writing checks, and should not be paying per-check for pre-printed stock either. This is a Windows application that takes the list, renders every check onto blank stock — amount in words, fractional routing, and a bank-readable MICR line — and keeps a record of every one it printed.

It runs entirely offline. No account, no sync, no telemetry, no network calls at all. It is licensed per installation and activates against a key rather than a server, because the machines it runs on are not always allowed on the internet.

A rendered check: company block, payee, amount box, amount in words, bank name, memo, signature line and MICR encoding line.
One check as the software renders it · all data on this page is invented
Organizations
5per installation, fully separate
Stock layouts
2one-up and three-up
Network calls
0including activation
Checks logged
Allsearchable, reprintable

The run

Four screens between a
spreadsheet and a printer

The person doing this is an office manager on a Tuesday afternoon with a stack of invoices, not a technician. Every screen does one thing, and every screen can be backed out of.

1

Import and review

The list arrives as an Excel file — the app hands out the template itself, so the columns are never wrong. Every row lands in an editable table: fix a payee here, skip a row, force one through despite a missing field. Nothing prints until this page is agreed with.

The review table: ten imported rows with pay-to, amount, memo, date and a skip checkbox on each.
2

Answer three questions

Which rows, preview or straight to the printer, and which stock. Three screens with two big choices each, instead of one settings page with everything on it. The wizard also catches the batch date, so a stack of undated rows can be dated in one move.

The preflight wizard, step one: choose all rows or select specific ones.
3

See the paper before it is paper

The preview is not a picture of the PDF — it is drawn in the browser engine from the same coordinates the PDF renderer uses, page by page, with zoom and a legend separating what the software prints from what is already on the stock. Ten checks, ten pages, all checkable before anything moves.

The check preview screen showing page 1 of 10 at 49% zoom with a legend.
4

Print, and keep the receipt

Checks go out one-per-page or three-per-page depending on the stock in the tray, and every single one is written to a log with its number, payee, amount, date and batch — searchable later, and reprintable individually when a printer eats one.

The print log: twelve records with printed timestamp, organization, check number, payee, amount, date and memo.

The part that has to be exactly right

The line at the bottom
is read by a machine

Close-up of the MICR encoding line: on-us symbol, check number, transit symbol, routing number, and account number in E-13B.
E-13B, at print size

A real font, not a lookalike

The encoding line is set in E-13B, the font a bank's reader-sorter is built around. Its symbols are not letters — transit, on-us, amount and dash each have their own glyph, and getting one wrong is the difference between a check clearing and a check coming back.

Position, not just characters

The line sits inside a clear band along the bottom of the check where nothing else may print. The renderer places it by measurement from the page edge, so the same file prints correctly on any printer that respects its margins.

Amounts written out, correctly

4,812.50 becomes Four Thousand Eight Hundred Twelve and 50/100 — and the amount box is padded with asterisks so a number cannot be extended by hand after it leaves the office.

Numbering that cannot slip

Check numbers advance per organization and are stored, not derived, so closing the app mid-batch does not reissue a number that has already gone out the door.

The admin panel: organization list, organization details, bank information with a bank autofill, signature options, plus app password and backup.

Set up once

Five companies,
one installation

Bookkeepers rarely run one set of books. Each organization carries its own address block, bank details, fractional routing, signature and check series, and the header switches between them without restarting anything.

Fractional routing autofills from a list of common banks, because it is the field nobody can find on a statement. Signatures are either an uploaded image or a blank line to sign by hand. There is an optional password on the whole program, and a one-file backup that carries every setting and the entire print log to another machine.

It ships as a product

Sold with a key,
not a login

This is not an internal tool that got a coat of paint. It installs from a signed Windows installer, activates against a license key validated on the device itself, and has a separate private application — not shipped to anybody — for issuing those keys.

Offline activation matters here: the machines that print checks sit in back offices behind restrictive networks, and a licence check that phones home is a licence check that eventually fails on a Friday afternoon.

The activation screen: a license key field with the format MSDA-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX and an Activate button.
A three-per-page render: three checks with sequential numbers 4187, 4188 and 4189 on one sheet.
Three per page · numbers advance down the sheet

Whatever is in the tray

Blank stock,
either cut

Blank check stock comes as one check with two stubs, or as three equal checks to a sheet. Both are rendered from the same coordinate model, so a shop that switches supplier switches a dropdown.

Printing goes out through a silent print pipeline rather than the operating system dialog, so a batch of forty checks is one confirmation, not forty.

What it replaced

A pen, and a lot of Tuesdays

Before this, the run was a person, a chequebook and an afternoon — and no record afterwards beyond the stubs. Now it is a spreadsheet, four screens and a searchable log, and the afternoon goes back to the office.