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Sending Cheques using the API

Sending Digital Checks using the API

How to create digital-only checks via the PostGrid API, including watermarked previews and retrieving deposit-ready PDFs for electronic delivery.

Digital Checks allow you to create digital copies of checks that can be sent electronically (for example, through e-mail) or printed by yourself. The feature needs to be enabled for your organization. To request it, please contact [email protected]

The Digital Check uses the same standard template as our postal cheques. The Digital Checks created through our API will not be sent out. They will instead be created with a cancelled status and a cancellation reason of digital_only.

Our full API documentation to create an Digital Checks can be viewed here.

To create a Digital Check, you can send a POST request to /cheques, and the field digitalOnly must be specified in the request body with a watermarkstring that will overlay the preview PDF of the Digital Check.

"digitalOnly": {"watermark": "Test"}

This link to the preview PDF is available in the urlfield of the chequeobject, similar to regular cheques in the API. This preview does not contain all the information needed to deposit a check. For example, the full account number is not visible.

A sample of the preview PDF of adigitalOnly check.

Preview PDF of a digital-only check with a watermark overlaid across the cheque, obscuring the full account number

To get the deposit-ready check, you must call the GET endpoint /cheques/:id/with_deposit_ready_pdf with the id of the digital-only cheque you want to retrieve. This endpoint cannot be used to retrieve regular/postal cheques. This endpoint can only be called by users with admin permissions, which can be granted by the administrator of your account.

This returns the cheque object with an additional field depositReadyPDFURL, which is a link to the non-watermarked, deposit-ready version of the Digital Check.

A sample of the deposit-ready PDF of adigitalOnly check.

Deposit-ready PDF of a digital-only check showing the full check details without a watermark, suitable for electronic delivery

NOTE: When a Test API key is used, the deposit-ready PDF will be the same as the preview PDF.