Meaning Of Numbers At The Bottom Of A
Cheque
You must very often have used your cheque book to issue a cheque to
someone, or better still have received it from someone. Apart from reading the
amount (that’s the first thing we see) have you ever looked at other numbers
written on the cheque? Ok, so you see account number and date but there are a
few more numbers written (four sets of numbers to be precise) at the bottom of
a cheque (see the pic below). Ever gave a thought to those? If you didn’t, read
further to know what these numbers mean.
To be honest with you, even I had no idea what these numbers stand for,
apart from the leftmost number which is the cheque number. Even googling about
it didn’t help (you can find some information about MICR though.) So during my
last visit to bank, I asked the branch manager about it, and he was kind enough
to explain it to me in detail.
1) Cheque Number
As I mentioned earlier, the first set of numbers represent the cheque
number. It is a six digit number.
2) MICR Code
It stands for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition. This number helps a
bank to recognize the bank and branch that issued the cheque. You might be
thinking that this can be done just by looking at the cheque, but banks have to
process hundreds of cheques daily. Going through each and every cheque is a
cumbersome process. Instead, the cheques are sorted through a cheque reading
machine which uses this number to identify the bank and branch a cheque belongs
to. This makes the process faster.
The MICR number is a nine digit number, which consists of three parts-
a) City Code: The first three digits represent the city code
and are same as the first three digit of the PIN code of that city.
For e.g., a bank in Hyderabad will have first three digits of MICR code
as 500 (since PIN code for Hyderabad starts with 500)
b) Bank Code: The next three digits represent the bank code. Every
bank has a unique code assigned to it. For e.g., ICICI bank’s code is 229, for
HDFC it is 240 and so on.
c) Branch Code: The last three digits represent the branch code.
Thus you can easily find which bank and branch a cheque belongs to by
looking at its MICR number, and vice versa.
3) Bank account
Number
The third set of six digit numbers represents your account number (It
consists of a few digits of your account number). But if you pick an old cheque
book, issued probably before CBS (Core Banking Solution) was introduced, you
won’t find this set of number present.
(Note: I am not completely sure of this. Branch Manager of the
bank I visited told me this, and when I checked my ICICI cheque book, it
tallied with my account number. If you see the sample cheque from Axis bank
shown above, it matches there as well. But when I checked my HDFC account
cheque book, I found this number and my account number to be different. If
someone belongs to a banking background, or has some information about this, please
tell others about it through your comments.)
4) Transaction ID
The last two digits tells whether a cheque is a local cheque our payable
at par cheque. 29, 30 and 31 represents payable at par cheque, while 09, 10 and
11 represents local cheque. Payable at par cheque is a cheque that can be
cashed at any branch of the issuing bank, while local cheque can be cashed only
at the issuing branch. So, if you deposit a cheque in your bank, with code 10
written at the bottom of the cheque, it’ll take a few days for the money to
come in your account. However since most of the branches these days are CBS
(Core Banking Solution) enabled, so the cheques are generally payable at par.
