Processing Cheques (Cheque 'Clearing')

Banks have to deal with thousands of hand-written, paper cheques every day.
When a cheque arrives at a bank, the information on the cheque has to be entered into the bank’s computer system so that the correct funds can be transferred between the correct accounts. Entering this data quickly and accurately is a time-consuming and difficult task.

To help speed things up, a special system of printing is used on cheques that can be read by a reader connected to the computer system. At the bottom of every cheque, printed in a special font using
magnetic ink, is the bank account number and cheque number:

Each cheque is passed through an MICR reader that can read these special numbers. (A small reader is shown here, but in large banks the MICR readers are much bigger and can thousands hundreds of
cheques.
The hand-written part of the cheque (the payee and the value of payment) can be entered into the computer system by either using a human to read the writing and typing the data in, or by using OCR.