Printing checks from bypass tray?

[BillG49]

Our printer has 4 interior trays for stock paper, plus a bypass tray that is pulled out from the side for printing on special paper - like check stock. How do you tell the check printing routines in PC+ that you want to pull from the bypass tray? We opened the door and loaded checks in the tray, but when we printed the checks, blank paper was pulled from the standard interior tray.

When printing a report from PC+, you are given the option to change printers, and then a Properties button is available to change various parameters, like which paper tray to use. When printing checks, you can change the printer, but there is no Properties button to access the options. Am I missing something obvious?

[NeilZ]

Our printer has 4 interior trays for stock paper, plus a bypass tray that is pulled out from the side for printing on special paper - like check stock. How do you tell the check printing routines in PC+ that you want to pull from the bypass tray? We opened the door and loaded checks in the tray, but when we printed the checks, blank paper was pulled from the standard interior tray.

When printing a report from PC+, you are given the option to change printers, and then a Properties button is available to change various parameters, like which paper tray to use. When printing checks, you can change the printer, but there is no Properties button to access the options. Am I missing something obvious?

No, you're not missing anything. The system does not give you any properties as its a different printer interface as it has to add the check number to any print image (if necessary) as well as update the database invoice. I'm not sure if the omission of the properties was an oversight, or because of the added processing.

In any case, for the time being I would just put the checks in the default drawer (usually drawer 1) and print from there. The other option is before you open Powerchurch to print checks, go to the printer under the Devices and Printers function of Windows, and set the properties of the printer there to use the bypass tray.

In my case, while I do have an bypass tray, I would not want to use it as during tests, the paper did not always remain lined up properly.

What I'll do is have one of the techs come by and add any additional info that I may not know of.

[BillG49]

Both of the solutions you suggest have been considered. In fact, the secretary has been using the default tray, but the problem is that our blank check stock is sorted with the lowest check number on the bottom to work with our previous printer. So she has to pull out the exact number of checks that will be used on the check printing run and reverse them so that the lowest number is now on top. It seemed like a simple solution to pull from the bypass tray, but we couldn't figure out how to tell the printer do do that.

Changing the printer defaults for a weekly check run seems tedious, but we could try it. Also thought about pulling out all the interior trays so that the bypass was the only available source, but we haven't tried that yet. We may stick with the method that works, even though I don't like it.

Thanks,
Bill

[Zorak]

Unfortunately, that is correct, PowerChurch doesn't allow changing the default printer properties/preferences when printing certain things (checks, labels, custom reports).

Another alternative that wasn't already mentioned would be to print to a PDF printer (like the built-in Windows "Print to PDF") and then access the full print preferences from the PDF Reader software.

[BillG49]

Neil & Zorak,

Thank you for your responses and suggestions. We'll probably continue to use our previous work-around.