check writing

I have a user who wants to write checks or at least vouchers from data that is stored in an Informix database. We need to have the ability to convert money amounts into their english words. For example, $10.95 converts to Ten and 95/100 Dollars. We have two schools of thought. One says to use one or two lookup tables to construct the string. The other says to write all of this in code to avoid the cost of the database accesses. I would appreciate any thoughts. Is this a canned routine somewhere? Randall Young sacs250!randy@veritas.com