Does the MICR line on checks have to be printed with magnetic toner?

I've seen many software products at the store for printing your own checks. Some even come with blank check stock, to suggest you could just install the software and print checks to your heart's content.





While all the packages will print the OCR characters, it is only in smaller letters on the package that they suggest that you use magentic ink or magnetic toner to print your checks.





A friend who has been using regular toner to print his checks for several years, says he's never had a problem, and never had a check returned. He claims that these days banks use optical character recognition to read the MICR line, and it's no longer necessary to deal with magnetic toner.





What's the real story?Does the MICR line on checks have to be printed with magnetic toner?
i believe that if a check is not encoded with magnetic MICR ink, it has to be keyed in manually. you can go to the bank and request a blank counter check to use and that would not have MICR, so they do it manually. i would suggest asking your bank. it is possible that in the fine print somewhere they might have a charge for having to deal with non MICR drafts against your account.





I would think it opens you up to more errors on your account by not having it automatically read.





i remember way back when The Tonite Show with Johnny Carson did a film of him writing a check on a bikini clad model and presenting her to a bank for payment. as i recall they paid, not sure how they handled the cancellation process! LOLDoes the MICR line on checks have to be printed with magnetic toner?
The real story is that it depends on the bank. The new laws which allow the scanning of the checks have made a big dent in this requirement. Every once in a while you will run into a bank that has some kind of problem with no MICR.





Source - I just sold a payroll processing business where we created the checks on the fly and did use MICR [in the last 12 months we were nailed by 5 different banks for issues with the MICR, it would have been at least that number if we used standard toner]