Check

Check Recipient

Plastiq Connect supports both US and Canadian Check Recipients.

When creating a Check Recipient, Plastiq supports validating and normalizing address before they are saved.

When paying a deliverable address, Plastiq will attach a delivery timeframe to the Recipient that can be viewed when creating either a Payment Intent or Payment.

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Checks to Canadian addresses

Canadian Checks use the same address format as US checks. To provide a Canadian Check address, enter the address's province as the state field and 'CA' in the country field.

Example:

• line1: "1050 Notre Dame Avenue"
• line2: null
• city: "Sudbury"
• state: "ON"
• postalCode: "P3A 5C2"
• country: "CA"

Using the receivingMethod property

These validations are always applied as described in the table below. Deliverability is optionally verified when the normalize property is sent as described after this table.

Verifying Deliverability and Normalizing Addresses

Plastiq Connect makes it easy to ensure that checks will arrive at their destination by offering an address verification and normalization feature.

When normalization is enabled, addresses are converted to a standardized address format using an industry standard address verification service.

By default, this feature is disabled. To use the feature, include "normalize": true in "receivingMethod" during creation of a check recipient.

Sending "normalize": true will behave as follows:

1. Address is verified and normalized.
2. Mistakes in the address are corrected when possible. For example, a mistyped city or state will be corrected using the postal code when the street address does exist in that city.
3. If verified, the normalized, updated address is saved as the receiving method.
4. If the address cannot be verified or if it is not unique, a validation error is returned.

In some cases, an otherwise valid address may return a validation error. Send "normalize": false to disable verification and normalization. Any address will be saved regardless of validity or deliverability, provided it passes basic alphanumeric validation described above.

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A few things to consider about address normalization

1. In rare cases, an address can be entered incorrectly such that it is "fixed" into a different address.
2. Occasionally an address does not exist or is incorrect in the verification database. Although we use an industry standard address verification service, some addresses still return a validation error despite being deliverable.

When implementing normalization for the benefit of your users, consider allowing the user to confirm the address that was saved. These entry errors are rare enough that we chose to normalize by default rather than erroring on nearly every address for small discrepancies. It is a good idea to confirm with a user that the address is indeed the correct receiving address before finalizing a payment.

Try it out

You will need to select a categoryId to be used for Recipient creation.