Customizing a cheque can be accomplished but can also be challenging,

Go to Setup / Reports and Forms / Cheques / Account (Pick your bank account for the cheques). click the radial button for Custom Forms. This will open a box on the next line where you can choose the form style for the cheques you are using. Once chosen then click on the box to the right of the description to Customize Form. This will open up the form designer. Before making any changes save the form with a new name and in a different folder. The folder with the standard forms can be over-written in a program update process and you would loose your custom form if saved in the same file. There are tutorials for customizing forms in the Form Designer and at SageU. Once you have made the changes save your work and close the designer. You will then have to pick the full path for your modified form. Now you will have to test your new design. Repeat from beginning as often as needed until you get what you want. Remember to save often. Use a Test/Sample company to preserve your data while making these changes.

Your other option would be to contact a Certified Consultant for Sage 50 Canadian and have them make the change for you. This will cost so ask the price before starting. Compare their price with what your time is worth trying to make the change yourself.

Before you go through the work that Alwyn is suggesting, go to the same Reports & Forms, Cheques page for your bank account and put 0.125 into the Top Margin box to see if that will push the text down the 1/8" you need.

If after that you don't have it lined up properly, either adjust the offset of 0.125 or us a custom form that Alwyn is suggesting.

Thanks for the response I will try your suggestion.

It beats the hell out of me that when I buy my cheques directly from Sage that the templates do not work! This is ridiculous that I have to spend the time to tweak their stuff after the amount of money I pay annually. I hope someone from Sage reads this so they can get their act together.

I am not from Sage, however, I have experienced your frustration but in a slightly different way. Sage setups up the templates and they generally work but the same template will print differently on different printers. I had a printer a couple of years ago where I had the template adjusted slightly to work. Thinking it would  save me some work when i needed to replace the printer I found the exact duplicate of the printer make, model, everything except the printer driver which had been updated. all of my custom forms had to be adjusted to suit the new printer. There are just too many for Sage to make one template fit all. 

Coach42 said:

the templates do not work

(I also am not from Sage.)

Nobody's templates work perfectly on every printer and every configuration.  As Richard suggested, add a little left and / or top margin to move the page to where it fits. 

I used to work for a tax software company supporting printing on preprinted forms.  We designed the printouts to 1/300 of an inch.  Printers running under DOS where the PCL output could be specified were soooo easy. 

Windows printing was another story, there were rounding and scaling issues with text positioning *most* printers.  Printing a page 2% off scale makes 8-1/2x11" into 8.17x11.22.  Even with the top, left corner aligned perfectly it ends up a whole line / couple of characters off by the end / right side.

 - Often, everything 'just works' or works with a little tweaking, maybe not perfectly but usually well enough.

 - If not, sometimes there are settings in the Windows print driver to disable scaling and get more consistent results.

 - if printing through a network queue you can specify multiple queues with a specific queue configured for Sage 50 forms (form feed tray only, fixed size no scaling, heavier ink, etc.

 - Some printers just can't accurately position the print consistently and accurately from page to page. 

 - get a high quality, repairable printer that you won't have to replace and reconfigure for 5-10 years.  If a 200,000 page rebuild kit and 10,000 page toners aren't available, it may be too cheaply made to rely on, and too expensive to operate.

 - Colour printers are 4x more complicated, troublesome, and expensive to run, than monochrome.

 - get an architect's scale to measure and tweak printer output for forms, and labels.

 - When setting up cheques, change the default 8 point font to a readable 10.

 - Use the one stub form if you often have 30+ invoices to pay on a cheque - photocopies are far cheaper than cheque stock.

 - Consider whether eliminating paper cheques altogether with electronic payment would work for your business / client.

I hope that helps,

Randy