Checks with Missing or Illegible Dates

on it — or a date is showing that only has a month and day, with no year.

When Valid8 extracts a check, a date it cannot read confidently is left empty rather than filled
in with a placeholder or a best guess. This is deliberate: an unreadable date is stored as no date
at all, not as invented text you would have to notice and clean up later.

The same caution applies to a date missing its year. Valid8 will not infer a year on your behalf —
a date with no year is refused outright rather than assumed. If a check's date is only partially
legible, expect the date field to come through empty rather than partially filled.

An item with no date can only ever match on check number. Two of the matching engine's comparison
passes require a date — an exact amount-and-date pass, and a wider pass that allows the bank
transaction's date to fall up to 15 days after the check's date — and neither can run without a
date on the check item. If your check has no date, it depends entirely on an exact check-number-
and-amount pass to ever produce a match; if the check number pass doesn't apply to it, or the
amount is also slightly off, it will sit in TO MATCH indefinitely until you supply the date
yourself.

Date is one of the fields you can edit directly on a check item, subject to the same status rule
as the rest of the item's fields: editable while the item is in TO MATCH or TO APPROVE, locked
once it reaches Matched. See Editing Check Details: Handwriting, Dates, Payee and
Payor for the full editability rules and how to unmatch an item if
it's already gone through.

Once you enter the date and save, the item becomes eligible for the date-based matching passes the
next time matching runs.

Separately from whether a date is present, Valid8 records a confidence verdict for fields it
extracts: confident, review, or illegible. A field flagged at a lower confidence level can be
surfaced for customer review, with hint text such as e.g. date illegible shown alongside it, so
you know which field the system itself is unsure about rather than having to guess from the
extracted value alone. There is no fixed threshold documented for when a field is marked one way or
the other — treat the flag as an indicator to check that field, not a guarantee that everything
else on the item is correct.

• An empty date field on a check is not a data-loss bug — it means the field genuinely could not
  be read, and Valid8 chose not to guess.
• If a check with no date isn't matching, check whether it also lacks the check number a
  check-number pass could use — a check with neither a usable date nor a matchable check number
  has no path to an automatic match until you fill one in.
• A field marked for review is worth checking even if the value shown looks plausible.