Patent ID: 7177840

Claim:
A system for imaging checks, each check comprising a financial instrument associated with a financial institution, comprising: an image capture host coupled to a sorter operable to sort a plurality of checks, to retrieve data from the checks and to record digital images of the checks, the image capture host operable to obtain the digital images of the checks recorded by the sorter; a processing system communicably coupled to the sorter and the image capture host and operable to: process each check based on the data retrieved from the check by the sorter in order to generate processing data for the check; and to store previous pass information for each check for which processing data was previously generated, the previous pass information comprising at least a portion of the previously generated processing data; and at least one computer-processable medium storing a database external to the sorter and coupled to the image capture host, the database operable to store the digital images of the checks obtained by the image capture host and the previous pass information; and wherein, in the event of restarting processing for at least a subset of the plurality of checks, the image capture host is further operable to: obtain the processing data generated for each check previously processed by the processing system; and automatically determine whether processing data was previously generated for a specified check and, if processing data was previously generated for the specified check, to obtain at least a portion of the previous pass information for the specified check from the database via the processing system such that the specified check is not reprocessed in order to generate processing data for the specified check.