Microsoft has told its north American partners they can’t pay it with checks (sic) after 1 December.  An English person reading the statement might wonder how they could buy Windows products by offering to have a quick look at the code and decide if anything is borked.

But Microsoft does make it clear that from 1 October , 2022, Microsoft will remove the check (sic) payment option from new commerce invoices.

This change affects only the United States (including Puerto Rico) and Canada, so Microsoft probably thought that it could get away with not needing to use the correct spelling of cheque. 

“All new and prospective partners will be required to remit payment to Microsoft only via wire transfer or ACH.” ACH is a bank-to-bank money transfer mechanism intended to replace use of physical cheques.

Vole has not explained why it will stop accepting cheques but manual processing of physical formats is so 20th century and is a lot slower than digital transfers.

US Federal Reserve data states that cheques have declined in popularity. In 1989 there were 72 million cheques processed daily and last year there were just 14.5 million daily. I have written two cheques in the last seven years and both for government services which I expected to take 100 years to process.