“Check numbers did not come through”
Checks arrive in the register as ordinary withdrawals with no number attached, which makes reconciling against a paper stub painful. The field for it exists in the format — the question is only whether your bank filled it in.
Symptoms
Check transactions import without a number in the check field The number appears in the memo or payee text instead of its own field Some checks have numbers and others do not, from the same account
What actually causes it
The bank left the field empty
OFX defines a CHECKNUM field for exactly this, but populating it is up to the bank. Many banks put the number in the transaction description instead, or omit it entirely, and no importer can recover what was never sent.
The transaction type is not marked as a check
Entries typed as a generic debit rather than CHECK may have their number ignored even when it is present, because the importer only reads that field for check-type transactions.
The number is inside the description
When the number arrives as part of the payee string ("CHECK 1234"), it is text rather than data, so sorting and searching by check number will not find it.
How to fix it
- Drop the file into the fixer below and look at what each transaction contains — this shows immediately whether the numbers were sent at all.
- If they are inside the description text, your app's renaming or memorised rules can often extract them into the proper field.
- If the field is genuinely empty, the numbers are not recoverable from this file; ask the bank whether a different export option includes them.
- For reconciliation in the meantime, match on amount and date rather than number.
Related import problems
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
The fixer shows the actual fields the bank sent, which distinguishes "your app ignored it" from "the bank never sent it" in seconds. Free, no signup, no upload.
Open the fixer