cheques: mixed dates and no comments

I ordered cheques with preprinted numbers which meant I had to use the user-defined payment cheque. After fiddling around for days I finally got it to work, sort of, but there are two problems:

First: my system is set to print the date month/day/year (whch is my preference). The top of the cheque prints day/month/year and the bottom two stubs print month/day/year ... really weird!

Second problem is that I can't get the comment on what the cheque was paid for to print out anywhere either on the cheque or on the two stubs ... Can anyone help please?

I am using SAGE 50 2017.

tx