Is there a standard check format in the USA?
"Legally, a check just needs to have a certain list of things (be an instruction to one's bank to pay a specific amount of money to bearer or to a specific entity, have a date, have a signature, etc.) There are anecdotes around of a guy depositing a junk mail check and it accidentally qualifying as a real check (which he turned into a live show), or of writing a check on a door, cow, or ""the shirt off your back"". What kind of checks your bank will process is technically up to them. Generally, if you get your blank checks printed up by any reputable firm, they'll have similar information in similar places, as well as the MICR line (the account and routing number in magnetic ink on the bottom) to allow for bank to process the checks with automated equipment. As long as it's a standard size, has the MICR line, and has the information that a check needs, your bank is likely to be fine with it. So, there are some standards, but details like where exactly the name of the bank is, or what font is used, or the like, are up to whoever is printing the check. For details on what standards your bank requires in order to process your checks, you'd have to check with your bank directly. Though, it wouldn't surprise me if they just directed you to their preferred check printer provider, as they know that they accept their check format fine. Though as I said, any reputable check printer makes sure that they meet the standards to get processed by banks without trouble. Unless you're a business that's going to be writing a lot of checks and pay a lot of fees for the privilege, a bank is not likely to want to make exceptions for you for your own custom-printed octagonal checks written in ancient Vulcan." "Many years ago, I worked on software that had to print the date, payee, and amounts on pre-printed checks.  Other than the MICR line (which had a particular placement with respect to the bottom edge and required a particular font in a particular point size), most aspects of the check layout and format were up to the particular check provider. Then there was a desire to start using optical character recognition to further automate check handling.  A standard came out, that most checks I see now seem to follow.  The standard dictated the exact dollar sign glyph to be printed to the left of the amount box.  This glyph was used by the OCR to locate the amount.  There were specific tolerances for where you could print/write the amount relative to that dollar sign.  There were also some requirements for the box containing the amount to have some clearance from the noisy backgrounds pre-printed on many checks.  But what font you used inside the amount box was, as far as I could tell, unspecified.  After all, customers could always hand-write the amount. Interestingly, the part of the check where you spell out the amount is known as the ""legal amount.""  If the amount in numerals and the amount in words don't match, the spelled version takes precedence, legally.  (The theory being that it's easier to doctor the numerals to change the apparent value of the check than it is to change the words.)  I always found it ironic that the layout standard to enable OCR standard was focused on reading the numerals rather than the legal amount.  OCR has come a long way since then, so I wouldn't be surprised if, nowadays, both amounts are read, even on hand-written checks. A little search shows that current (voluntary) standards are put out by the ANSI X9 group." No, there is no standard. I see all kinds of paper sizes, and the amount, date, etc. is all over the place. They are all rectangular, but otherwise there seems to be a lot of freedom. "Nope, anything is that has the required information is fine.  At a minimum you need to have the routing number, account number, amount, ""pay to"" line and a signature. The only laws are that it can't be written on anything illegal, like human skin, and it has to be portable, not carved on the side of a building ( for example) https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-20434,00.html http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/12/people-actually-cash-big-novelty-checks-even-possible/ That said, the MICR line and standard sizes will make things eaiser for they bank, but are hardly required.  You could write your check on notebook paper so long as it had the right information, and the bank would have to ""cash it"". Keep in mind that a check is an order to the bank to give your money to a person and nothing more. You could  write it out in sentence form. ""Give Bill $2 from account 12344221 routing number 123121133111 signed _________"" and it would be valid. In practice though, it would be a fight. Mostly the bank would try to urge you to use a standard check, or could hold the funds because it looks odd, till they received the ok from ""the other bank"". But.... If you rant to fight that fight...."
As soon as the USA left the gold exchange standard, total factor productivity began to dramatically stagnate.   We can trace it back to the early 1900s, but because of electricity, oil, automobiles and computers it is best to track it from Nixon taking us off the gold standard:  http://azizonomics.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/tfp.jpeg  Coincidence? I don’t think so — a fundamental change in the nature of the money supply coincided almost exactly with a fundamental change to the shape of the nation’s economy. Is the simultaneous outgrowth in income inequality a coincidence too?  Keynesians may respond that correlation does not necessarily imply causation, and though we do not know the exact causation, there are a couple of strong possibilities that may have strangled productivity:  1.Leaving the gold exchange standard was a free lunch for policymakers: GDP growth could be achieved without any real gains in productivity, or efficiency, or in infrastructure, but instead by just pumping money into the system.  2.Leaving the gold exchange standard was a free lunch for businesses: revenue growth could be achieved without any real gains in productivity, or efficiency.  And it’s not just total factor productivity that has been lower than in the years when America was on the gold exchange standard — as a Bank of England report recently found, GDP growth has averaged lower in the pure fiat money era (2.8% vs 1.8%), and financial crises have been more frequent in the non-gold-standard years.  Bottomline, it is the best explanation for a fall in productivity even factoring in computers. You will most likely not be able to avoid some form of format conversion, regardless of which data you use since there is, afaik, no standard for this data and everyone exports it differently. One viable option would be, like you said yourself, using the free data provided by Dukascopy. Please take into consideration that those are spot currency rates and will most likely not represent the rate at which physical and business-related exchange would have happened at this time. Be sure to consider the difference between Roth 401K and standard 401K. The Roth 401K is taxed as income then put into your account. So the money you put into the Roth 401K is taxed as income for the current year, however, any interest you accumulate over the years is not taxed when you withdraw the money.  So to break it down: You may also want to look into Self Directed 401K, which can be either standard or Roth. Check if your employer supports this type of account. But if you're self employed or 1099 it may be a good option. I ended up just trying. I gave A the IBAN of B's account, which I calculated online based on the bank code and account number (because B claimed IBAN won't work, so didn't give it to me), and B's name. A was able to transfer the money apparently without extra difficulties, and it appeared on B's account on the same day. Contrary to some other posts here, IBAN has nothing to do with the Euro zone, nor is it a European system. It started in Europe, but it has been adopted as an ISO standard (link). As usual of course some countries don't see the urgency to follow an international standard :) XE.com has a list of all IBAN countries; quite a few are non-European. Here is even the list formatted specially for the European-or-not discussion: link. "Uh, have you tried google docs? Start off simple. Other than that, for the moment I use GNUCash. Some day I might try to write my own, but for now it works well enough. I have a number of scheduled transactions in GNUCash, and it records them days in advance. You talk about ""I should have how much money"", but GNUCash offers a slightly better format: Future Minimum Balance. If you want to know whether you can spend money in an account without triggering a chain reaction, that's the number you want. Being web-based so that it can be accessed from any OS. GNUCash is cross platform, with Windows, OSX and Linux clients. It also supports mysql/postgres database backends, so while it's not ""Web based"", you can keep your data ""in the cloud""." "Parts of what you want are possible, but taken as a whole, you're out of luck. First of all, there is no master database of every cardholder in the country.  The only way to check if information is correct is to ask the issuing bank.  The AVS system is a way to automate doing so, but it's possible to call the bank directly and verbally verify the address.   That means you're subject to the whims of what the issuing bank chooses to support.  Banks that are part of the Visa and MasterCard networks generally only verify the numeric parts (address, apartment number, zipcode).  AmEx can also verify the cardholder name.  But if the bank doesn't have support for validating something, you can't validate it. Separately, there is a ""verify-only"" transaction which some processors support, which will do exactly what you want:  Return AVS values without ever charging the card.  However, processors require you to have the ""approved merchant account"" you don't want to have to have.  Without being a merchant, you shouldn't have access to other people's credit cards anyway.  Would you really want anyone in the country to be able to verify anyone else's address whenever they want? In short, whatever purpose you have for wanting this probably falls into one of three categories:" This answer will be US-centric but hopefully most of the information will be applicable to other jurisdictions: Generally speaking: "Do not use a shared bank account.  One of you can cash/deposit the check in your personal account and then either pay the others in the group cash or write them a check.  You open yourself up to many, many problems sharing a bank account and/or money.  Treat it like a business as far as income goes, but I would not recommend any type of formal business, LLC, partnership, sole proprietorship, etc. For federal taxes, you just keep track of how much ""you"" personally are paid and report that at the end of the year as income, most likely on a 1040EZ 1040SE, along with any other income you have."