Decided to phase out cheques

[Rachael]

5-7 business days seems long to me. Have you spoke to your bank about the wait time for cheques to clear?

Although some banks will clear a cheque sooner or immediately, that sadly doesn't mean the funds are available in the payer's account.
If the client banks with the same bank the provider does, the time to learn about a NSF cheque is faster. But when the funds are being sent from one bank to another, it takes longer to know for sure.

Although the cheque might be cleared and the funds made available, if later in the process it's learned that the funds weren't in the payer's account, that credit will be reversed.

The cheques go to a central sorting location and then they are scanned and the information sent to the payer's bank for payment. That means it goes centrally somewhere within your banking organization and then the information goes centrally somewhere to the client's banking organization. Depending on what time of the week that deposit was made, it can take between 5-7 days to discover that the payer didn't have sufficient funds to clear the cheque. Once that discovery is made, the credit is reversed, the bounced cheque returned to the banking organization of the provider, who in turn write to their customer and inform them.

Some banks hold funds for the duration of that entire process - usually for new clients or for those who don't deposit cheques often. When a bank customer regularly pays in cheques and has a history of those cheques being good, then the duration the customer is made to wait to access the funds, is shortened. But that's only because the bank is expecting the cheque to be good based on banking history of the person making the deposit. A bad cheque might be reverse credited up to 10 business days after deposit, depending on where the central place for processing is.

This is why scammers get away with fake cheques. The banking organization is usually out of country and so the cheque presented for payment has to be sent out of country for validation of funds being available. I know when my parents send a cheque to the boys for birthday's or Christmas, before I had a history of these cheques being good, they would sometime be placed on hold for up to 6 weeks.