Electronic check services make for additional methods of accepting payments from customers. But what is an electronic check service? It is a service usually offered by credit card processors along with their merchant services, that allows customers to pay for goods and services using their personal or business checking account from your web site. Electronic check processing (ECP)is meant to help organizations by reducing the volume of their paper transactions. This method of payment processing is especially effective for businesses that have thousands of transactions per month.
The benefits of electronic check processing include a lessened chance of accepting bad checks, elimination of trips to the bank to deposit checks, makes for an additional payment method, and takes much lesser time for funds to be deposited in a bank account. Check services are available for just about every type of business, except business types that are extremely high risk.

An electronic check service conducts:

- Check Conversion
Check conversion makes for converting a paper check into an electronic transaction. This is made possible by passing the physical check through a check imager or a magnetic check scanning device. Following the imaging process, the check is to be deposited in the businesses bank account. To make sure that the bank account has sufficient funds, a check guarantee service usually accompanies check conversion.

- Check Verification
This involves comparing the check writer against a national list of check writers to identify any discrepancies as far as a history of writing bad checks is concerned. Simply avoid accepting checks from someone known to write bad checks. Check verification also involves scanning it to check for authenticity by passing it through a magnetic check reader.

- Check Guarantee
This involves the check processing company verifying the check at their end and guaranteeing the value of the check to the business. In case the check still turns out to be insufficient, the check processor takes responsibility of giving the business the full value of the check and taking further action against the fraudulent check writer.
ACH/ Bank Drafting: Bank drafting and ACH (Automated Clearing House) are electronic systems that require a routing number and checking account number to be manually entered into a software system. The business can then debit their customer’s checking account electronically, and can setup recurring payments for that same checking account.

- E checks
Just as in bank drafting, an e-check service allows a merchant to accept e-checks online from customers.
An electronic check service can work wonders for a business that accepts a large volume of checks, or any business that runs into losses owing to bad checks. However If you only accept one or two checks per month, then a check service probably isn’t a cost-effective choice.