Abstract: A point of sale system designed to read information from a consumer's check, credit card, or manual input with a subsequent debiting of a consumer's account and crediting a merchant's account for the goods or services provided. Point of sale terminals are designed to accept a form of credit card with a consumer's bank account information encoded thereon or in the alternative to read the MICR number from a consumer's check in order to verify that a consumer has an appropriate balance to conduct the transaction with a given merchant. Thereafter the transaction of that information is transmitted to a central computer system which verifies the consumer's credit worthiness and stores the transaction event information for subsequent bank reconciliation via the ACH network. The invention eliminates the need for paper checks with all bank reconciliation being accomplished electronically.