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3.6 Dealing with Petty Cash

Something that stops many people from keeping a ledger at all is the insanity of tracking small cash expenses. They rarely generate a receipt, and there are often a lot of small transactions, rather than a few large ones, as with checks.

One solution is: don't bother. Move your spending to a debit card, but in general ignore cash. Once you withdraw it from the ATM, mark it as already spent to an ‘Expenses:Cash’ category:

     2004/03/15 ATM
         Expenses:Cash                      $100.00
         Assets:Checking

If at some point you make a large cash expense that you want to track, just “move” the amount of the expense from ‘Expenses:Cash’ into the target account:

     2004/03/20 Somebody
         Expenses:Food                       $65.00
         Expenses:Cash

This way, you can still track large cash expenses, while ignoring all of the smaller ones.