Chefjue-Signing Machine

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29908, 23 August 1962, Page 7

Chefjue-Signing Machine

This small machine, commissioned yesterday, gives particular pleasure to the Canterbury Education Board's accountant (Mr D Wilson), left, and the secre-tary-manager (Mr W. P Spencer). It will save them jointly signing more than 20.000 cheques a year. Every board member will be just as pleased because every cheque has also had to be countersigned by one of them.

The cheque-signing machine. in the form above, will handle more than 100 payments in five minutes and. with an automatic feeder, it could handle 5200 an hour. The Canterbury Education Board pays out about £4.000.000 a year. Teachers hold their own cheque books for salaries and they endorse the forms themselves, but all other payments have required cheques signed by board members and officers. First in S.l.

Believed to be the first in the South Island, the machine is claimed to be forgery-proof and errorproof The signatures are printed off a plate with two names. These signatures might be imitated but it would be virtually impossible to duplicate by other means the complicated background against which they are writ-

ten. It is a crazy pattern of whorls and dots, something like a series of fingerprints, and it u reproduced in three colours.

To operate the machine it must be unlocked with two keys. Two senior officers of the board have one each and they must both be present when mechanical chequesigning is done. After that the process is simple. The cheque is placed in a slot (on right of the machine) as in a postagefranking machine and a touch on a lever does the signing in a moment. The Education Board will use the machine for its payments to school transport contractors, teacher-drivers, parents receiving conveyance and boarding allowances, firms supplying maintenance equipment and stores, tradesmen on small jobs, contractors for new school buildings, booksellers supplying free textbooks. suppliers of articles bought by public and private school committees on subsidy, wages of caretakers and cleaners, and sundry other expenses.

Mr Spencer and Mr Wilson will be freed of the chore of signing 20.000 cheques a year under these headings. Board members have taken turns but they* will be delighted not to have to sign cheques the moment they, set foot in the office.