[WillowTheWhisp]

Originally Posted by big al

All cheques can be passed over for banking into another account as long as the payee has signed the back as a waiving of their right to present & cash the cheque.

Not if it is a crossed cheque (which means it has two vertical parallel lines running through it) with the words "account payee" or "account payee only". That means it can only be paid in to a bank account in the name of the payee. (Unless banking law has changed since I took my exams but I very much doubt it.)

At one time "open" cheques (ie no parallel lines or where the lines had been "opened" by the issuing account holder and signed by the him/her) could be cashed over the counter of the issuing bank branch but that meant that the recipient of the cash couldn't be traced in case of a query or problem so it became preferable to insist that all cheques were "cashed" via a bank account (in practice paying the cheque into an account and drawing cash out.) This was normal practice anyway if the issuing branch was inaccessible.

In those days a cheque could be "signed over" to any number of other people. For instance if the cheque was made out to "Fred Smith" he could write on the back "Please pay Joe Bloggs" and then sign it. In turn Joe Bloggs could write under that "Please pay Ermintrude Chuckabutty" and sign it and so on.

Eventually it simply became acceptable for the original recipient just to sign the back and then the cheque became negotiable (in much the same way as a five pound note). It then lost the whole point of being a cheque apart from the fact that it was possible to trace it back to the bank where it was eventually deposited.

Back in the olden days cheques used to be forwarded on to the bank branch of the account holder where it was someone's job to check through them all for things which may indicate fraud, even verifying every signature against a record of the account holder's signature kept in the branch. Nowadays there are so many cheques issued that it has become totally impractical if not downright impossible to do that.

In the early days they all had to be sorted into account number order each day too so that if anyone asked for a cheque to be traced it was a simple enough proceedure to go down into the bowels of the earth (ie the strongroom) and sift through boxes of cleared cheques for the right date and then through that bundle for the very cheque itself. Ah the good old days.