Money orders, demand drafts, and pay orders all share one rule with cheques: the amount appears twice, once in figures and once in words. Banks trust the words when the two disagree, so getting the words right is not a formality. It is the part that decides whether your payment goes through.
A money order is prepaid, which makes people careless about it. Do not be. Write the amount in words exactly as you would on a cheque. One thousand two hundred fifty rupees only. No shortcuts, no "1,250/-" in the words line, and no leaving the line blank because the figures are already there. A blank words line is the fastest way to get a money order returned.
Demand drafts work the same way, with one extra trap. The draft is issued by one bank branch and paid by another, so the words amount is checked twice, at issue and at payment. Any mismatch between figures and words stops the draft at the second counter. Write the amount slowly, read it back digit by digit, and check the hyphens: twenty-one, thirty-five, forty-seven. A missing hyphen rarely causes a rejection on its own, but a wrong word does.
Pay orders are bank-issued, so the bank fills in most of the form. Your job is the remitter section, and the amount in words is yours to write. Keep it simple. Use "only" at the end, and draw a line through any empty space after the words so nothing can be added later. This is the same habit that protects cheques, and it protects pay orders for the same reason.
Three mistakes show up again and again. First, writing "and" in the wrong place. In formal amounts, "and" belongs before the final part, as in one thousand two hundred and fifty, not scattered through the number. Second, dropping the decimal part. Fifty paise is not nothing: write "and fifty paise only" rather than leaving the cents out. Third, copying the figures into the words line by mistake. The words line should contain words, nothing else.
If you write these instruments often, a quick check helps. Type the amount into a free numbers-to-words converter (https://wordsfornumbers.com/) and compare its output with what you wrote by hand. It takes ten seconds, and it catches the exact slips, a missing "and", a wrong tens word, that cause rejections at the counter.
The rule is the same across cheques, money orders, demand drafts, and pay orders. Figures say the amount. Words prove it. Write the words carefully, read them back, and your payment will not come back to you.
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