What it means
An ordinary open cheque can be presented at a bank counter and cashed by whoever happens to be holding it. Crossing it, by drawing two parallel lines across a corner, removes that option and forces the money through the banking system.
Whoever ends up with the funds must have an account, which makes them traceable after the event. This matters because a lost or stolen open cheque is very close to cash.
Once crossed, a thief cannot simply walk into a branch and collect the money, and the collecting bank holds a record of exactly who deposited it. For a business posting payments or handing them to a courier, that difference is the entire point of the exercise.
There are several recognised styles of crossing. A general crossing is just the two lines, sometimes with the words "and company" written between them, and means only that the cheque must be banked somewhere.
A special crossing names a particular bank between the lines, so only that bank may collect the funds. Two extra wordings are extremely common in practice.
"Account payee only" restricts the cheque to the account of the named payee and blocks it from being endorsed on to somebody else, which is why most printed chequebooks now carry it pre-printed. "Not negotiable" does not prevent transfer, but it means anyone who takes the cheque gets no better title than the person who handed it over, so a stolen cheque cannot be cleaned up by passing it through an innocent third party.
Crossing is a feature of cheque law in Commonwealth jurisdictions rather than a universal banking practice. It is not part of standard United States practice, where the phrase is mostly encountered in international trade documents or in translated contracts.
Anyone accepting a crossed instrument across borders should confirm the receiving bank actually recognises the crossing before relying on it for protection. Cheque volumes have fallen sharply as electronic transfers took over routine payments.
Crossings still appear on dividend warrants, tax refunds, insurance settlements and supplier payments, and where cheques survive at all, crossing them costs nothing and removes an obvious weakness in the process.
In practice
Real-world examples.
Example
A charity receives roughly 400 donation cheques a month through the post. Its finance policy requires every outgoing grant cheque to be crossed and marked "account payee only", so that if an envelope goes missing in transit the funds cannot be diverted into a stranger's hands. When one cheque did go astray, the charity stopped it and reissued without any loss.
Example
A property management company pays contractors by cheque because many of its small suppliers still prefer it. All cheques are crossed, and the bookkeeper matches the collecting bank details on the returned cheque images against the supplier records each month. On one occasion the mismatch revealed that a contractor had been banking payments into an unrelated account, which prompted a wider review.
Example
An exporter in Singapore receives a crossed cheque drawn on a local bank as part settlement of an invoice. Because the crossing prevents it being cashed at a counter, the exporter's finance team knows the funds will pass through its own account and can be reconciled to the invoice number. It still waits for clearance before releasing the goods, since a crossing controls who gets paid, not whether the cheque will actually be honoured.
Case study
Seen in the real world.
Larchmere Supplies is an invented, illustrative wholesale business in the United Kingdom that paid about 90 suppliers a month by cheque. For years the accounts team printed open cheques and posted them in ordinary envelopes, on the reasonable-sounding basis that nothing had ever gone wrong.
Then a batch of envelopes was stolen from a postal sorting facility. Three of the cheques, totalling roughly $28,000 in value, were cashed at branch counters by people who had no connection to the named suppliers. Larchmere's bank had followed its own procedures correctly, and recovery turned into a slow argument about who bore the loss.
The response was unglamorous and effective. Larchmere switched to pre-printed cheques carrying a general crossing and the words "account payee only", moved its 30 largest suppliers to electronic transfer altogether, and started sending anything above a set value by tracked post. In this illustrative case the fix cost almost nothing, but it closed the specific gap that had allowed a stolen piece of paper to become somebody else's cash.
Watch out
Common mistakes.
- Believing a crossing guarantees payment. Crossing only controls how the cheque may be collected, and a crossed cheque will still bounce if the account behind it has insufficient funds.
- Thinking a crossing works everywhere. It is a Commonwealth cheque-law concept with no direct equivalent in ordinary United States banking practice, so international counterparties may simply not treat it as meaningful.
- Assuming any two lines will do. The crossing needs to be across the face of the cheque in the conventional position, and adding or altering a crossing after issue can amount to a material alteration that invalidates the instrument.
Questions
People also ask.
Can a crossing be removed once it is drawn?
No, opening a crossed cheque is treated as a material alteration, and only the drawer can authorise it, usually by cancelling the cheque and issuing a fresh one.
What is the difference between "not negotiable" and "account payee only"?
"Account payee only" restricts collection to the named payee's own account, while "not negotiable" allows transfer but strips any later holder of the protection they would normally get from taking the cheque in good faith.
Is crossing still worth doing if cheque use is falling?
Yes, because the cheques that remain tend to be higher-value payments such as settlements and dividends, and the control costs nothing to apply.
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