Petty Cash & Expense Book

What this tool does

CM8-56 is a petty cash book. You record every movement of cash in and out of the float — top-ups, small expenses, reimbursements to employees — and the tool keeps the running balance, totals the spend by category and by month, flags payments that should have a receipt but do not, and prints a reconciliation your bookkeeper or accountant can work from.

Everything runs inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind, so what your business spends its cash on never leaves the computer you are using.

How a petty cash float works

The standard way to run petty cash is the imprest system. You decide a fixed float — say 300 in your currency — and put that much cash in a locked tin. Small payments come out of the tin, each one recorded with a receipt. Periodically you top the tin back up, and the top-up should equal the receipts since the last one: cash plus receipts always adds back to the float. That equality is the whole control — if the tin plus the receipts do not add up to the float, money is missing or a payment was not recorded, and you know the same day rather than at year end.

This book supports that discipline but does not force it. You can run a fixed imprest float, or a looser float that you top up by whatever round amount is convenient. Either way, the arithmetic is the same: what the tin should hold is the opening float plus everything in, minus everything out.

Recording transactions

One row is one movement of cash. Record it when it happens — a petty cash book written up from memory at the end of the month is where discrepancies come from. Each row carries:

• Date — the day the cash moved, not the day you wrote it up.
• Type — top-up, expense, or reimbursement. The type sets the direction of the money.
• Description — what it was, in enough words that it makes sense in a year.
• Category — used for the spend breakdown. On a top-up it is ignored.
• Amount — always entered as a positive number. The tool applies the sign from the type, so you can never accidentally record an expense as money in.
• Paid to / received by — the shop, person or account on the other side.
• Receipt held — tick it only when the physical or scanned receipt is actually in the tin or the file, not when somebody has promised one.
• Approved by — who authorised the payment. For most small businesses initials are enough; the point is that someone other than the spender saw it.

The three transaction types

Top-up is cash added to the float — usually drawn from the bank or transferred from the till. It is the only type that increases the balance.

Expense is cash paid straight out of the tin to a shop or supplier: stamps, milk, a courier, a part from the hardware shop.

Reimbursement is cash paid to an employee who has already spent their own money on the business. It leaves the tin exactly like an expense — the separate type exists because the paperwork differs: a reimbursement should be backed by the employee's receipt and a signed claim, and your bookkeeper may want to see reimbursements listed separately.

The signed amount column applies the direction for you:

The running balance

The "Cash in the float" figure and the balance-over-time chart both come from one calculation:

Two consequences are worth being clear about, because the tool is deliberately strict about both:

The balance depends on the opening float. The opening float on the Settings tab is the cash the tin held when this book started. It is not calculated — you must set it. If it is wrong, every balance this tool ever shows is wrong by exactly that amount, which is why the reconciliation table prints it as its first line where anyone checking can see it.

The balance ignores the filter. Filters are useful for looking at one month or one category, but a balance computed from a filtered slice of the book would be meaningless — hiding last month's expenses does not put the cash back in the tin. So the balance tile, the balance-over-time chart and the reconciliation table always use every record, and say so on screen. The spend and top-up tiles, the category donut and the monthly charts do follow the filter, because a total for a chosen period is a sensible question.

When the balance falls to or below your low-balance warning level, the Float status tile flags that a top-up is due, and the warning level is drawn as a dashed line on the balance chart.

Receipts and approvals

Petty cash is the easiest money in the business to lose track of, and receipts are the control. Set the "Receipt required above" threshold on the Settings tab — many small businesses use a small figure so that only trivial amounts escape the rule, and setting it to zero requires a receipt for everything.

Any expense or reimbursement above the threshold with the receipt box unticked is marked Missing in the register, counted in the Missing receipts tile, and listed by date in the "Payments missing a receipt" table with the person who approved it — which is the list to work through before the accountant asks. Below the threshold, an unticked box shows "Not required" rather than pretending a receipt exists.

The tool records that a receipt is held; it does not store the receipt itself. Keep the paper in the tin until the reconciliation, then file it with the printed report.

Reconciling against the tin

On whatever rhythm suits the size of the float — weekly or monthly for most small businesses — count the cash and compare it with the reconciliation summary, which shows the full arithmetic:

If the tin holds less than the closing balance, either a payment was never recorded or cash has gone missing; if it holds more, a top-up or a refund was not recorded. Small differences are usually a forgotten trivial purchase; either way, record what you find rather than adjusting quietly — an honest "other" entry with a note explaining the count difference is a better audit trail than a book that always balances perfectly.

Do the count with two people present where you can. It protects the cash, and it protects the person who keeps the tin.

Categories

The categories are a practical small-business set: travel, postage, refreshments, stationery, cleaning, small repairs, and other. They exist so that the spend donut can show you where the cash goes and so the bookkeeper can post totals to the right expense accounts, not to satisfy any particular chart of accounts — if a payment does not fit, use "other" and say what it was in the description.

If "other" becomes one of your biggest slices, that is the donut telling you the descriptions matter more than the categories: make sure each "other" row says clearly what it was.

Reading the charts

Spend by category breaks down expenses and reimbursements in the current filter. Top-ups are money in, so they never appear in it.

Spend per month totals the payments out for each month. One tall bar is usually one large payment, not a trend — check the register before concluding anything.

Balance over time plots the cash the tin should hold after each day that had a transaction, always from the whole book and the opening float, with your warning level as a dashed line. A sawtooth shape — steady falls, sharp rises — is what a healthy float looks like.

Money in vs money out per month stacks top-ups against payments. Over several months the two should roughly balance; if the out-slice wins every month, the float is shrinking and the balance line will show it heading for your warning level.

Printing and sharing

Print Report produces a report from whatever the current filter shows: headline figures, the four charts, the reconciliation summary, the missing-receipt list, the full cash book and your closing notes. Print to PDF to send it to your bookkeeper, or print it on paper, staple the receipts to it and file it — that bundle is a complete petty cash voucher for the period.

The scope line under the title states the filter in force. The reconciliation and the balance always cover the whole book regardless of the filter, and the report says so where they appear.

Saving your work

Transactions, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the book for spreadsheet work and includes every filtered record, not only those drawn on screen. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool records what you enter and calculates from it. It cannot see the cash tin, so it cannot detect a payment that was never recorded, a top-up entered twice, or an opening float that was wrong on day one — and every balance depends on all three. The count against the tin is the check; this book is the record you check against.

Requirements for expense records, receipts and approvals differ by country and by tax regime, and so do the periods for which records must be kept. This is a record-keeping and arithmetic aid, not an accounting system, not tax advice, and not a substitute for keeping the receipts themselves.