Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

6–2. Avoid Delays in Check Posting

When there is a sudden influx of checks, the accounting staff may require an extra day to post them all against the accounts receivable database. This delay can also occur when the payments being made are slightly different from the invoices that they are paying, which requires some delay while the differences are reconciled. Though these problems can create a real bottleneck in the accounting department, they also result in a lengthening of the time interval before the checks are deposited at the bank, which in turn results in lost investment income.

To avoid this problem, the accounting staff can photocopy checks as they arrive, so that postings can be done from the copies, rather than the original checks. This allows the deposit to be made at once, rather than later. The main problem is the danger that a check will not be copied or that the copy will be lost, which results in a missed posting to the accounts receivable database. This problem leads to downstream collections and research problems involving backtracking to find the missing checks, thought it can be avoided through proper reconciliation procedures that match the total number of copied checks to the total number of actual checks, as well as the total amount posted to the total amount on the copied checks.

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