Petty Cash Book

A petty cash tin is the smallest ledger in any organisation and the one most likely to be wrong. The amounts are tiny, nobody feels the need to be careful about two pounds forty, and by the end of the month the cash and the book have quietly parted company. This article explains the imprest system the tool is built on, walks through every panel on the page, and says what to do on the day the count does not agree.

Three vouchers, six sums: the demo sheet worked right through

There is not much arithmetic on this page, and none of it is out of sight. Six figures are worked out from the rows you type, and each is one line of adding or taking away.

Every amount is turned into whole pence the moment it is read. The number in the box is multiplied by a hundred and rounded to the nearest whole one, so 9.45 is held as 945 and 12.80 as 1280. Nothing is divided back into pounds and pence until it is put on screen.

The page opens with a small example, and it is worth walking through. The float and the opening balance are both set to 250.00. The currency is guessed from your browser's language setting, falling back to US dollars when it cannot tell, and the figures below read it as pounds. Three vouchers are already there: PV-001, recorded delivery, 9.45 under Postage & courier. PV-002, milk and biscuits, 12.80 under Refreshments. PV-003, a box of printer paper, 18.20 under Stationery & office.

Paid out is 945 plus 1280 plus 1820, which is 4045, shown as £40.45. Nothing came in, so Received is £0.00. The running balance starts at 25000, drops to 24055, then 22775, then 20955. Balance per book is £209.55, and that figure turns up three times: beside the last row, at the foot of the Balance column, and in the small total above the buttons.

Now the check the whole system rests on. The reimbursement is 25000 take away 20955, which is 4045: £40.45, the same as the vouchers. The two agree here because this sheet opened at the float and nothing was received during the period. They will not always agree, and the gap is not random. The reimbursement runs ahead of the vouchers by however far the opening balance sat below the float, less anything received on the way.

Say you tip the tin out and find two £50 notes, five £20 notes, one £5 note, two £2 coins, a fifty pence piece and a five pence piece. In pence that is 10000 plus 10000 plus 500 plus 400 plus 50 plus 5, which comes to 20955. The panel reads: £209.55 counted in 12 notes and coins. Copy it into the counted box and the difference is nought, so the line says the tin holds exactly what the book says, and reminds you that a top-up of £40.45 restores the float.

Take one £5 note out of that pile and the count becomes £204.55. The difference is 20455 take away 20955, which is minus 500, and the wording turns into: the tin is short by £5.00. Book £209.55, counted £204.55. Only the sign picks the word. Over and short are one subtraction read from either end.

The Analysis for posting table takes the same three vouchers, groups them by category and puts the biggest first: Stationery & office £18.20, then Refreshments £12.80, then Postage & courier £9.45. The codes box starts with three lines already typed, so 7504, 7501 and 8205 print beside them. Only Paid out amounts reach that table. A row with money in the Received column is labelled Reimbursement on the printed sheet, whichever category was picked for it.

• Paid out: every figure in the Paid out column added up.
• Received: every figure in the Received column added up.
• Balance per book: the opening figure, plus each receipt and minus each payment, taken one row at a time in the order the rows sit in.
• Difference: the counted figure minus the balance per book. Plus means over, minus means short, and a blank counted box means the sum is not done at all.
• Reimbursement to restore the float: the agreed float minus the balance per book.
• The low point: the smallest the running balance ever gets to on the way down the sheet, tested after every single row rather than only at the end.

Where the coin grid and the warnings run out

The notes and coins offered for the count come from a short table built into the page, one list per currency. Eleven currencies have a list of their own: pounds, euros, US dollars, Canadian dollars, Australian dollars, New Zealand dollars, rupees, rand, Singapore dollars, dirhams and yen. The currency menu holds thirty-three, so the other twenty-two drop back to a stock ladder of 100, 50, 20, 10, 5, 2 and 1, then 50, 20, 10, 5 and 1 in the small unit.

The lists are cut off at the top on purpose. Pounds and euros both start at 50, because nobody keeps a five hundred euro note in a drawer with the biscuit money. If a bigger note does turn up in your tin, it has no row, and you have to add it in and type the total into the counted box by hand.

There are gaps at the small end too, and they are worth knowing before you blame your own counting.

Whatever you type as a quantity is cut down to a whole number, and anything that is not above nought is thrown away. Two and a half twenties counts as two. The grid also never compares itself against the sheet. It is an adding machine and nothing more, so you can ignore it and type a total you worked out on paper.

The warning list is a fixed set of tests, and it helps to know where it ends. It counts rows with no date, rows dated outside the From and To boxes, payments with no voucher number, rows with money in both columns, and voucher numbers used more than once. Repeats are matched without regard to capitals, so PV-12 and pv-12 are treated as one slip, and at most three are named before the message says “and others”.

None of those tests touch the totals. A row dated outside the period is flagged and still added in. A row with no date at all is flagged and still added in. The two date boxes are used for comparing and for printing, and they filter nothing. If a sheet is meant to cover one month only, the stray rows have to come off it by hand.

There is plenty the page cannot know. It has no idea whether a receipt exists, whether the figure on the row matches the slip, or whether the category is the right one. It spots a voucher number used twice but not one that has been skipped. There is no tax column, so it will not pull the VAT out of a receipt for you. It holds one sheet in one currency, so a tin with two currencies in it needs two sheets. And it follows the tin alone. The other side of the reimbursement, where the money left the bank, belongs in somebody else's ledger.

Two last quirks. An amount box holding something the page cannot read as a number counts as nought, quietly. And a row is only treated as real if the details, the voucher, the paid out or the received box has something in it, so a row with nothing but a date and a category is invisible to every total on the sheet. When you close a period, the sheet number goes up by one and keeps its width: PC-0001 becomes PC-0002, and PC-0099 becomes PC-0100. A reference with no digits in it, such as Reception tin, simply gets a 2 put on the end.

• Canadian dollars have no one cent row. The list stops at five cents.
• The Australian list also stops at ten cents, so a five cent coin has nowhere to go.
• US dollars have no fifty cent coin and no two dollar note.
• The yen list runs from ten thousand down to ten, and offers nothing smaller.
• A currency the browser prints with no decimal places and has no list of its own still gets the stock ladder. Korean won is the plainest case: the lower rungs are worth less than one won, and their labels stop being distinct.

What the tin is actually for

Most money now moves by card or bank transfer. Cash has not gone away, though, and small offices still need a few notes in a drawer. Stamps for a parcel that has to go today. Milk and biscuits. A taxi for a courier who did not turn up. A light bulb from the shop on the corner. None of these are worth raising a purchase order for, and none of them can wait a week.

So the tin exists. Somebody is put in charge of it, a sum of money goes in, and people take small amounts out when they need to. That is the easy part. The hard part is being able to say, at any moment, exactly how much should be in there and what happened to the rest.

This is where small sums are dangerous. Nobody queries two pounds. Nobody counts a tin every week. Money does not usually leave a petty cash box in one dramatic theft; it leaks a coin at a time, through good intentions and short memories, and after six months there is a gap nobody can explain. A cash book is what turns a drawer of loose change into something you can check.

The imprest system in one page

The imprest system is an old idea and a very good one. You fix the float: a set sum the tin is always brought back to. Two hundred and fifty is common for a small office. Money is paid out only against numbered vouchers. At the end of the period, the cashier hands over exactly what was spent, and the tin goes back to the float.

The clever part is what that does to the arithmetic. Because the top-up always equals the vouchers, the sum in the tin plus the vouchers in the tin should always come to the float. Every day, not just on the day you count. That single rule means anybody can check a petty cash box in two minutes without opening the book at all: count the cash, add up the slips, and see whether it comes to the float.

This tool is built around that rule. You set the float once, and the reconciliation works out what the top-up should be. When the tin has been reimbursed properly, the balance goes back to the float and the vouchers go off to the bookkeeper. Nothing else in the system needs explaining.

The float and the opening balance are not the same thing

The first panel asks for two amounts, and people often type the same number in both. On the very first sheet that is correct, but the two boxes mean different things.

The agreed float is fixed. It is the sum the organisation has decided the tin should hold, and it does not change from month to month unless somebody decides it should. The opening balance is what is actually in the tin when this sheet starts. If the last period ended with eighty-two pounds and the tin has not been topped up yet, the opening balance is eighty-two pounds and the float is still two hundred and fifty.

Choosing the float is a judgement call. Too small and the custodian is asking for a top-up every fortnight, which wastes everybody's time. Too big and there is more cash sitting in a drawer than there needs to be, which is a risk in itself and often a problem for the insurance. A float that lasts roughly a month of normal spending is about right. If you find yourself topping up twice a month, every month, raise it.

The rest of the panel is the paperwork around the figures: who holds the tin, who checks it, where it lives, and which sheet number this is. All of it prints at the top of the sheet, because a signed page that does not say who held the money is not much use six months later.

One line for every voucher

A petty cash voucher is a small slip: the date, what the money was for, how much, and a signature from whoever took it. The receipt gets stapled to it. The slip is numbered, and that number is the only link between a line in your book and a piece of paper in the tin.

Each row here takes the same information. Date, what it was for, a category, the voucher number, and the amount paid out. Fill the slip in first and the row second, not the other way round. The order matters more than it sounds: a slip written after the fact is somebody's memory of a purchase, and memories round themselves up.

The Received column is for money coming into the tin rather than going out. Two things land there. One is the reimbursement from the cashier that restores the float. The other is change coming back, which happens when somebody takes twenty pounds for a job that only cost fourteen. Both are receipts, and both need a line of their own.

A single line should never carry an amount in both columns. If somebody took twenty and brought six back, that is two entries, not one netted-off figure of fourteen. The tool checks for this and says so, because a netted line hides the fact that twenty pounds actually left the tin.

The row you have not touched yet is ignored. It will not print, and it does not count towards anything, so you can leave one open while you hunt for the next slip.

Reading the running balance

Every entry shows the balance after it, both beside the row and in the Balance column of the printed sheet. That figure is what the tin should have held at that moment. It is the single most useful number in the whole book, because it lets you check the tin at any point rather than only at the end.

The balance cannot go below zero. A tin holds notes and coins; it cannot hold less than nothing. So when the tool warns that the balance falls below zero part way down the sheet, something in the book is wrong rather than something in the drawer.

There are only two usual causes. Either a top-up has not been entered, so the book does not know about money that genuinely went in, or the rows are in the wrong order and a payment appears before the money that funded it. The Sort by date button settles the second case in one click.

Sorting is a button rather than something that happens by itself, and that is deliberate. A cash book is a chronological record, and the order the lines sit in is part of what it records. Quietly rearranging somebody's ledger while they are typing in it would be presumptuous, and it would also hide the very mistake the warning is trying to point at.

Categories, codes, and what the bookkeeper does with them

Nobody posts forty individual petty cash slips to the accounts. What happens instead is that the sheet is totalled by category, and one journal goes in for each category. Nine pounds of postage, twelve pounds of tea and biscuits, eighteen pounds of paper. That is the Analysis for posting table on the printed sheet, and it is often the only part anybody outside the office ever reads.

Only amounts in the Paid out column are analysed. A top-up is not an expense; it is cash moving from the bank into the tin, and putting it in a spending category would count the same money twice.

The nominal codes box is a small convenience with a big payoff. Type lines like Postage and courier equals 7501, one per line, and the code prints next to the category total. The person posting the sheet no longer has to look each one up or guess. Ask your bookkeeper for the codes once, type them in, and they stay in the tool from then on.

The category list covers what actually comes out of a petty cash tin: stationery, postage, fares, refreshments, cleaning things, small repairs, staff welfare, subscriptions, and sundries for everything else. If your organisation uses different names, type over them. Sundries is meant to be the exception, though. A sheet where half the money is filed as sundries tells the reader nothing, and it is the first thing an auditor asks about.

Counting the tin

The whole point of a cash book is that it can be checked against something physical. So at the end of the period, you count.

Tip everything out and sort it into piles of the same note and coin. Count each pile once, and type how many you have into the box for that denomination. The panel adds it up and shows the total, and the button copies that total into the counted figure. If you would rather do the counting on paper, skip the grid entirely and type the figure straight into the box below it.

A blank counted figure means not counted yet. It does not mean zero. That sounds obvious, but a tool that treated an empty box as a count of nothing would announce a shortfall equal to the entire float every time the page opened, and after the third time nobody would read the warning at all.

Changing the currency empties the count. The denominations on offer change with it, and twelve of something is not twelve of something else, so keeping the numbers and relabelling them would produce a total that looks reasonable and is wrong.

Count in front of somebody else if you possibly can. It is faster, it is more accurate, and the Checked by line at the foot of the sheet exists so that both of you can sign what you found. A count with two signatures on it is evidence. A count with one is an assertion.

The day the count does not agree

It will happen. A tin that is twenty pence out is not a scandal; it is a coin that rolled under the desk or a receipt somebody has not handed in yet. What matters is what you do next.

Count it again first. Miscounting a pile of the same coin is far more common than a real loss. Then go through the vouchers and check that every one has a line in the book, and that none has been typed in twice. Check the arithmetic on any receipt with several items on it. Look for an IOU, a note, or a slip that has fallen behind the tin.

If the difference is still there, write it down. Put it in the notes box so it prints on the sheet, and have both people sign. Then correct the book to the counted figure only through a visible line, never by quietly editing an entry until the numbers agree. Adjusting a ledger to match the cash is the one thing you must not do, because it destroys the only record that could ever explain what happened.

One difference is noise. A pattern is information. A tin that is a few pounds short every single month, always in the same direction, is telling you something that a single month never could, and it is much easier to see when each sheet has been printed and filed.

Closing the period and carrying the balance forward

When the sheet is done, counted and signed, you close it. The button does five things at once. The closing balance becomes the opening balance of a new sheet. The dates move on. The sheet reference goes up by one. The entries are cleared. The count is emptied.

If the checkbox above the button is ticked, the new sheet also starts with the reimbursement that restores the float, dated the first day of the new period. That is usually exactly what happens in real life: the cashier hands over the money on the day the old sheet is handed in, and the tin is back at its float before the first new voucher is written.

The dates are handled with a small piece of care. If the period you just closed ran the length of a whole calendar month, the new one becomes the next whole calendar month. Otherwise the new period is the same number of days as the old one. Without that rule a book kept monthly would slide a day or two on every close and end up straddling month ends, which is the one thing monthly is meant to avoid.

Closing does not keep the old sheet. There is no archive of past periods in this tool, and that is a deliberate choice rather than an omission. A pile of somebody's financial records living in a browser that can be cleared by accident is not a safe place for them. Print the sheet or download the CSV first, then close. The paper in the file is the record.

Getting the sheet out of the page

Press Print and the rest of the page steps out of the way: the panels, the menus and the adverts are hidden, and only the sheet is sent to the printer. Pick a real printer if you want a page to sign and file. Pick Save as PDF instead and you get a file whose text can still be searched and copied. This site carries no PDF library of its own and does not need one, because the writer already built into the browser does a better job than a bolted-on script would.

The PNG button drops a picture of the sheet straight into your downloads without asking anything, which is far easier when you are working from a phone. Save as text hands back the wording on its own, handy when somebody just wants the figures in a chat message.

The CSV is for whoever keeps the accounts. It writes a line for the opening balance, then one line per entry with its running balance, then a line for the closing balance. The sheet reference, the location and the name of the custodian are repeated on every line, so no single row loses its meaning once an import has shuffled them about. Dates are always written year first, whatever the sheet itself is set to show. Printed dates are a courtesy to a human reader; a file that leaves a computer guessing whether 04/08 is April or August is how a month ends up posted twice.

The file also begins with a byte order mark. That invisible marker tells a spreadsheet the text is UTF-8. Without it, a program such as Excel may fall back to whatever character set the machine uses locally and mangle every currency symbol on the page.

Habits that keep a tin honest

Write the voucher before the money leaves the tin. This is the whole discipline in one sentence. The moment somebody is allowed to take a note on the promise of a receipt later, the system has stopped working, and it is remarkably hard to start it again.

Do not let anybody use the tin as a cash machine. Lending a fiver until payday feels harmless, and every petty cash box that has ever gone badly wrong started with exactly that.

Do not use petty cash for things it is not for. Wages, contractor payments, and anything that should go through an invoice have no business in a cash tin. If a payment is big enough to need thinking about, it is too big for petty cash.

Enter the top-up on the day it arrives, not at the end of the month. A book that is behind is a book nobody trusts, and it is the main reason balances go negative on paper.

Keep the tin locked, and keep the key with the person named on the sheet. Shared custody sounds friendly and is the reason nobody can be asked what happened.

Count on a fixed day. The last working day of the month is fine. A count that happens when somebody remembers is a count that stops happening.

Where the figures live

All of the working happens inside the page you are looking at. The float, the entries, the names, the codes and the count stay on your own machine. There is no sign-in, no upload and no copy sitting on somebody else's server. That matters more for a cash book than you might expect, because a petty cash sheet is a quietly detailed picture of how an organisation runs and who spends what on whom.

As you type, the sheet is tucked into the small store that belongs to this browser, so a reload, a crash or a tab shut by mistake does not cost you the afternoon. That copy is tied to this browser on this computer and nowhere else. Wipe your browsing history and it goes with it. Open the page on a laptop across the office and the sheet will not be waiting there.

Start again empties that store and brings the page back with the small worked example in place. It asks before it does it, because nothing sits behind it to undo the change.

A closing word on the arithmetic. Amounts are kept as whole pence inside the page and turned back into pounds and pence only when they are shown, and each figure is rounded on its own, once. Handle the same column as decimal fractions and it can finish a penny away from the truth after thirty rows. In a book whose whole job is agreeing with a drawer full of coins, a stray penny is not an interesting quirk of rounding. It is the reason the count fails.