are there any special procedures for managing non-petty cash?
"You manage this account just as any other account. ""Petty cash"" refers to accounts where the cash money is intended for ad-hoc purchases, where you store an amount of cash in your drawer and take it out as needed. However, other than naming it ""petty cash"", there's nothing petty about it - it's an account just as any other. Many choose to just ""deduct"" the amount transferred to ""Petty Cash"" account and not manage it at all. Here the amount matters - some smaller amounts can fall under ""de minimis"" rules of the appropriate regulatory authority. Since you told nothing about where you are and what your business is - we can't tell you what the rules are in your case. If you track the usage of this account (and from your description it sounds like you are) - then the name ""Petty Cash"" is meaningless. It's an account just like any other. Since you have an employee dealing with this cash you should establish some internal audit procedures to ensure that there's no embezzlement and everything is accounted for. You will probably want to reconcile this account more often than others and check more thoroughly on what's going on with it. Since its a ""personal finance"" forum, I'm assuming you're a sole proprietor or a very small business, and SEC/SOX rules don't apply to you. If they do - you should have a licensed accountant (CPA or whatever public accountancy designation is regulated in your area) to help you with this." After talking to two CPAs it seems like managing it using an imprest system is the best idea. The base characteristic of an imprest system is that a fixed amount is reserved and later replenished as it runs low.  This replenishment will come from another account source, e.g., petty cash will be replenished by cashing a cheque drawn on a bank account. Petty cash imprest system allows only the replenishment of the spend made. So, if you start the month with €100 in your petty cash float and spend €90 of that cash in the month, an amount of €90 will be then placed in your petty cash float to bring the balance of your petty cash float back to €100. The replenishment is credited to the primary cash account, usually a bank account (Dr - Petty Cash a/c, Cr - Bank a/c) and the debits will go to the respective expense accounts, based on the petty cash receipt dockets (Dr- Expense a/c, Cr - Petty Cash a/c). In a non imprest system where a fixed amount is issued every month, e.g., €100 every time cash is required, there is no incentive to ensure all money issued has been documented because when money is all spent a check for a fixed amount is issued. It is much more difficult to reconcile a non imprest system as you never know how much exactly should be in the float. In an imprest system the amount requested is documented, the documentation being the petty cash dockets and their associated receipts or invoices. So at all times you can check how much should be left in the petty cash float by deducting the amount spent from the opening petty cash float.
How do I withdraw a large sum from my bank and give it to a money management firm? Either write a check to the Money Management firm or wire transfer the funds to the account mentioned. I'm not a finance professional by any means, but my understanding of cashier's checks is that they're more in favour of the person receiving. They're essentially guaranteeing that you have the money in your account to provide payment to the recipient.   The advice I've always received is to treat cashier's checks and money orders as straight up cash, because that's essentially what they are.  Hopefully someone else can come in with a better background, but I figured I'd pitch in. 1 Primary acct. Receive and distribute money to all other accts. For security do not permit debit cards to touch or payment pull from this account.  All joint bills paid here. Attach a savings acct and credit card to this account for accruing taxes vacation money blah blah. This will facilitate managing instead of storing your funds. 2 Push distributions to one or two other individual accounts on whatever basis works. Cash groceries incidentals. Debit cards here. Structuring, as noted in another answer, involves breaking up cash transactions to avoid the required reporting limits.   There are a couple of important things to note.   And, the biggest caveat - there have been many cases of perfectly legitimate transactions that have fallen foul of the reporting requirements.  One case springs to mind of a small business that routinely deposited the previous day's receipts as cash, and due to the size of the business, those deposits typically fell in the $9,000-$9,500 range.  This business ended up going through a lot of headaches and barely survived.  Some don't.   A single batch of transactions, if it is only 2 or 3 parts and they are separated by reasonable intervals, is not likely in and of itself to be suspicious.  However, any set of such transactions does run the risk of being flagged.   In your case, you also run afoul of the Know Your Customer rules, because it's not even you depositing the cash - it's your friend.  (Why can your friend not simply write you a check?  What is your friend doing with $5k of cash at a time?  How do you know he's not generating illegal income and using you to launder it for him?)  Were I your bank, you can be very certain I'd be reporting these transactions.  Just from this description, this seems questionable to me.   IRS seizes millions from law-abiding businesses "You state ""Any info will be appreciated"", so here's some background information on my answer (you can skip to my answer): When I worked for banks, I was required to submit suspicious activity to the people above me by filling out a form with a customer's name, SSN, account number(s) and ID.  You may hear in media that it is $10K or sometimes $5K.  The truth is that it could be lower than that, depending on what the institution defines as suspicious.  Every year we were required to take a ""course"" which implied that terrorists and criminals use cash regularly - whether we agree or disagree is irrelevant - this is what the course implied. It's important to understand that many people use cash-only budgets because it's easier than relying on the banking system which charges overdraft fees for going over, or in some cases, you pay more at merchants because of card usage (some merchants give discounts for cash).  If someone has a budget of $10K a month and they choose to use cash, that's perfectly fine.  Also, why is it anyone's business what someone does with their private property?  This created an interesting contrast among differently aged Americans - older Americans saw the banking system as tyrannical busybodies whereas young Americans didn't care.  This is part of why I eventually left the banking system; I felt sick that I had to report this information, but it's amazing how quick everyone is to accept the new rules.  Notice how one of the comments asks you what you intend to do with the money, as if it's any of their business.  Welcome to the New America©! My answer: If you withdraw $100,000, here is what will more than likely happen: Now, watch the anger at this answer because I'm telling you the truth.  This article will explain why.  Your very question had a negative 1, as if asking what you're asking is wrong (see the absurdity)!  If Joseph Stalin ran for president in the United States, the majority of Americans would welcome him.  You have good reason to be concerned; others at this site have noticed this as well." PocketSmith is another tool you might like to consider. No personal banking details are required, but you can upload your transactions in a variety of formats. Pocketsmith is interesting because it really focus on your future cash flow, and the main feature of the interface is around having a calendar(s) where you easily enter one off or repetitive expenses/income. http://www.pocketsmith.com/ "A money order is basically a pre-paid check. The physical cash would probably get deposited into a ""master"" custodial bank account. Each money order has a different bank account number on the check where the funds are available as you have paid-for already. With the routing number as well, your traditional bank account will be able to process it as a deposit.  For USPS money orders though, they can be cashed directly at their retail locations." If you want to keep any consistent standard, you need to knuckle down and make those transaction entries. Honestly, this is a lot faster doing in bulk than doing day-by-day.  But change how you account so it isn't annoying.  I minimize my bookable transactions.  For instance I deposit all income whole (for tracking) but stop tracking when the money is converted to cash or gift card money - I log adding $50 to a McDonalds gift card, but not the individual meals.  I only use cash for the myriad small things I do not want to track - fast food, parking meters, etc.  Anything big or that I want to track goes on a credit card.  Then it's easy to reconcile credit cards to accounting system.   (Cathy) Ryan's Law: if it wasn't written down, it didn't happen. That is definitely where my intuition went as well. I know we wouldn't meet certain requirements. I expect to have to jump through hoops to make it happen. I was mostly asking what hoops I will jump through, and if we will have to jump through fewer if we are not planning on handling other people's cash. The easiest options appear to be to open an account with one of the large multinational banks like Citi. They have options such as opening two separate checking accounts, one in each currency, and Citi in particular has an international account that appears to make mutli-currency personal banking easier. All of the options have minimum balance requirements or fees for conversion, but if you need quick access this seems to be the best bet. Even if this is a one-time event and you don't need the account, a bank like Citi may be able to help you cash the check and get access to the funds quicker than a national or local bank. http://www.citibank.com/ipb-global/homepage/newsite/content/english/multi_cap_bank_depo.htm Alternatively if you know anyone with a US bank account you can deposit it with them and take the cash withdrawal from their account, assuming they agree, the check isn't too large, etc. I would say when starting with Gnucash to start with the level of granularity you are comfortable with while sticking to the double entry bookkeeping practices. So going through each one: Refund for Parking Pass. Assuming you treat the Parking Pass as a sunk cost, i.e. an Expense account, its just a negative entry in the Expense account which turns into a positive one in your Bank account. Yes it may look weird, and if you don't like it you can always 'pay from Equity' the prior month, or your Bank Account if you're backfilling old statements. Selling physical items. If you sold it on eBay and the value is high enough you'll get tax forms indicating you've earned x. Even if its small or not done via eBay, treat it the same way and create a 'Personal Items/Goods' Income account to track all of it. So the money you get in your Bank account would have come from there. Found jacket money would be an Equity entry, either Opening Balances into Cash or Bank account. Remember you are treating Equity / Opening Balances as the state before you started recording every transaction so both the value going into Assets (Banks,Stock,Mutual Funds) and Liabilities (Mortgage, Student Debt, Credit Card Debt) originate from there. You have two different operations going on: They each have of a set of rules regarding amounts, timelines, taxes, and penalties. The excess money can't be recharacterized except during a specific window of time.  I would see a tax professional to work through all the details. Yes, those numbers are all that is needed to withdraw funds, or at least set online payment of bills which you don't owe. Donald Knuth also faced this problem, leading him to cease sending checks as payment for finding errors in his writings. I would recommend pre-paid debit cards. Every quarter a fixed amount of money is loaded onto the card (or a new card is issued). This prevents any large-scale fraud from occurring. "Uh, have you tried google docs? Start off simple. Other than that, for the moment I use GNUCash. Some day I might try to write my own, but for now it works well enough. I have a number of scheduled transactions in GNUCash, and it records them days in advance. You talk about ""I should have how much money"", but GNUCash offers a slightly better format: Future Minimum Balance. If you want to know whether you can spend money in an account without triggering a chain reaction, that's the number you want. Being web-based so that it can be accessed from any OS. GNUCash is cross platform, with Windows, OSX and Linux clients. It also supports mysql/postgres database backends, so while it's not ""Web based"", you can keep your data ""in the cloud""."