How to quickly track daily cash expenses that don't come with a receipt?
A pencil and a small notepad really work here, but if you have a smartphone then some way of using it makes sense as well. Try: Transcribe all of these onto a better record at the end of each day. Also record the amount of money in your wallet/purse/pocket every day, and check to see if the amounts you've recorded add up to the amount you've spent. It'll be easier to remember that newspaper you bought at the end of the day, rather than a week later. Or just record the difference as 'miscellaneous'. Go the opposite approach.  Budget a certain amount of cash and keep it combined.  Don't exceed it (but next time budget more if you need to).   If you were in the USA (where card acceptance is near universal) what I do is simply use my visa check card for all purchases and download it to my personal finance software, where you can assign categories.
"Bookkeeping and double-entry accounting is really designed for tracking the finances of a single entity. It sounds like you're trying to use it to keep multiple entities' information, which may somewhat work but isn't really going to be the easiest to understand. Here's a few approaches: In this approach, the books are entirely from your perspective. So, if you're holding onto money that ""really"" belongs to your kids, then what you've done is you're taking a loan from them. This means that you should record it as a liability on your books. If you received $300, of which $100 was actually yours, $100 belongs to Kid #1 (and thus is a loan from him), and $100 belongs to Kid #2 (and thus is a loan from her), you'd record it just that way. Note that you only received $100 of income, since that's the only money that's ""yours"", and the other $200 you're only holding on behalf of your kids. When you give the money to your kids or spend it on their behalf, then you debit the liability accordingly and credit the Petty Cash or other account you spent it from. If you wanted to do this in excruciating detail, then your kids could each have their own set of books, in which they would see a transfer from their own Income:Garage Sale account into their Assets:Held by Parents account. For this, you just apportion each of your asset accounts into subaccounts tracking how much money each of you has in it. This lets you treat the whole family as one single entity, sharing in the income, expenses, etc. It lets you see the whole pool of money as being the family's, but also lets you track internally some value of assets for each person. Whenever you spend money you need to record which subaccount it came from, and it could be more challenging if you actually need to record income or expenses separately per person (for some sort of tax reasons, say) unless you also break up each Income and Expense account per person as well. (In which case, it may be easier just to have each person keep their entirely separate set of books.) I don't see a whole lot of advantages, but I'll mention it because you suggested using equity accounts. Equity is designed for tracking how much ""capital"" each ""investor"" contributes to the entity, and for tracking a household it can be hard for that to make a lot of sense, though I suppose it can be done. From a math perspective, Equity is treated exactly like Liabilities in the accounting equation, so you could end up using it a lot like in my Approach #1, where Equity represents how much you owe each of the kids. But in that case, I'd find it simpler to just go ahead and treat them as Liabilities. But if it makes you feel better to just use the word Equity rather than Liability, to represent that the kids are ""investing"" in the household or the like, go right ahead. If you're going to look at the books from your perspective and the kids as investing in it, the transaction would look like this: And it's really all handled in the same way an Approach #1. If on the other hand, you really want the books to represent ""the family"", then you'd need to have the family's books really look more like a partnership. This is getting a bit out of my league, but I'd imagine it'd be something like this: That is to say, the family make the sale, and has the money, and the ""shareholders"" could see it as such, but don't have any obvious direct claim to the money since there hasn't been a distribution to them yet. Any assets would just be assumed to be split three ways, if it's an equal partnership. Then, when being spent, the entity would have an Expense transaction of ""Dividend"" or the like, where it distributes the money to the shareholders so that they could do something with it. Alternatively, you'd just have the capital be contributed, And then any ""income"" would have to be handled on the individual books of the ""investors"" involved, as it would represent that they make the money, and then contributed it to the ""family books"". This approach seems much more complicated than I'd want to do myself, though." "Here's a very basic MySQL query I put together that does what I want for  income/expense report. Basically it reports the same info as the canned income/expense report, but limits it those income/expenses associated with a particular account (rental property, in my case).  My main complaint is the output ""report"" is pretty ugly. And modifying for a different rental property requires changing the code (I could pass parameters etc). Again, the main ""issue"" in my mind with GnuCash income/expense report is that there is no filter for which account (rental property) you want income/expenses for, unless you set up account tree so that each rental property has its own defined incomes and expenses (i.e. PropertyA:Expense:Utility:electric).  Hopefully someone will point me to a more elegant solution that uses the report generator built into GnuCash. THanks! SELECT a2.account_type , a4.name, a3.name, a2.name, SUM(ROUND(IF(a2.account_type='EXPENSE',-  s2.value_num,ABS(s2.value_num))/s2.value_denom,2)) AS amt FROM    (     SELECT  s1.tx_guid     FROM    gnucash.accounts AS a1         INNER JOIN gnucash.splits AS s1 ON s1.account_guid = a1.guid     WHERE   a1.name='Property A'         ) AS X     INNER JOIN gnucash.splits s2 ON x.tx_guid = s2.tx_guid     INNER JOIN gnucash.accounts a2 ON a2.guid=s2.account_guid     INNER JOIN gnucash.transactions t ON t.guid=s2.tx_guid     LEFT JOIN gnucash.accounts a3 ON a3.guid = a2.parent_guid     LEFT JOIN gnucash.accounts a4 ON a4.guid = a3.parent_guid WHERE   a2.name <> 'Property A' # get all the accounts associated with tx in Property A account (but not the actual Property A Bank duplicate entries.         AND t.post_date BETWEEN CAST('2016-01-01' AS DATE) AND CAST('2016-12-31' AS DATE) GROUP BY a2.account_type ,a4.name, a3.name, a2.name  WITH ROLLUP ; And here's the output. Hopefully someone has a better suggested approach!" Businesses are only required to keep receipts over $751. However for individuals, I would throw them all in a shoebox and not worry about organizing them.  There's a small chance you'll need to go through them during an audit, and you can worry about reconciling all of them and putting them in order at that point.  Just write 2010 on the box and keep it somewhere easy, and at the end of the year throw it in your basement (or get a scanner, and scan and trash the original). "I found your post while searching for this same exact problem. Found the answer on a different forum about a different topic, but what you want is a Cash Flow report.  Go to Reports>Income & Expenses>Cash Flow - then in Options, select the asset accounts you'd like to run the report for (""Calle's Checking"" or whatever) and the time period. It will show you a list of all the accounts (expense and others) with transactions effecting that asset. You can probably refine this further to show only expenses, but I found it useful to have all of it listed.  Not the prettiest report, but it'll get your there." I wrote a small Excel-based bookkeeping system that handles three things: income, expenses, and tax (including VAT, which you Americans can rename GST).  Download it here. "If you're curious, here are my goals behind this silly madness You said it... The last two words, I mean...:-) If you're auditing your statements - why do you need to keep the info after the audit? You got the statement for last month, you verified that the Starbucks charge that appears there is the same as in your receipts - why keeping them further? Done, no $10 dripping, throw them away. Why do you need to keep your refrigerator owner's manual? What for? You don't know how to operate a refrigerator? You don't know who the manufacturer is to look it up online in case you do need later? Read it once, mark the maintenance details in your calendar (like: TODO: Change the water filter in 3 months), that's it. Done. Throw it away (to the paper recycle bin). You need the receipt as a proof of purchase for warranty? Make a ""warranty"" folder and put all of them there, why in expenses? You don't buy a refrigerator every months. That's it, this way you've eliminated the need to keep monthly expenses folders. Either throw stuff away after the audit or keep it filed where you really need it. You only need a folder for two months at most (last and current), not for 12 months in each of the previous 4 years." Try the following apps/services: Receipt Bank (paid service, gathers paper receipts, scans them and processes the data), I've tested it, and it recognizing receipts very well, taking picture is very quick and easy, then you can upload the expenses into your accounting software by a click or automatically (e.g. FreeAgent), however the service it's a bit expensive. They've apps for Android and iPhone. Expentory (app and cloud-based service for capturing expense receipts on the move), I use iBank for Mac to keep track of my expenses. I also use the iPhone version since they can sync over Wi-Fi and I can capture expenses right on the spot instead of trying to remember what I spent on when I turn on my laptop. First, I try to keep electronic records (with appropriate backups) whenever it seems feasible: utility bills, credit card statements, bank statements, etc. This greatly cuts down on storage space, and are kept forever.  For hard copy records, it depends on the transaction.  I try to balance filing time and recover time, by how likely it is that I will need to access a record in the future.  I'm much less likely to need the receipt for this mornings coffee at Starbucks than I am to need the utility bill for my rental property (100%, come tax time).   For instance, by default I file my credit card receipts, that don't get filed elsewhere, by year with all cards kept together, and cull them after 5-7 years. I keep all of the credit card receipts, just because it is less effort for me than making a decision about what to keep and what to discard.  I put them in an accordion file by month of charge, and keep two, for the current year and previous years. At the beginning of each year, I get rid of the receipts in the oldest file and reuse it. Anything that needs to be kept longer that a couple of years gets filed separately. Certain records are kept together.  For example, car repair/maintenance receipts are filed by vehicle and kept for the life of the vehicle (could be useful when its sold, to provide the repair history).  All receipts for the rental property are kept together, organized by account. I'll keep these until the property is sold. All tax related receipts that don't have a specific file are kept together, by year, along with the tax return. Have you looked into GnuCash? It lets you track your stock purchases, and grabs price updates. It's designed for double-entry accounting, but I think it could fit your use case. The stores track the individual items for inventory planning and marketing purposes. Having worked in the transaction processing business for a time (writing one), I can say with confidence that the credit/debit card companies do not receive an itemized list of the items involved in the transaction. There is usually a description field in the information transmitted to the processor, which may or may not contain useful information. But it is not big enough to contain an itemized grocery list of any size. And it is not standardized in any way that would facilitate reliable parsing. There may be an amount of metadata about the transaction that would indicate the types of products involved in the transaction, which they can also infer from the merchant reporting the transaction. There are efforts to increase the amount of data reported, but they are not widely used yet, due to the overwhelming numbers of banks that would need to be upgraded. These efforts are rolling out only in specific and limited uses where the banks involved are willing to upgrade software and equipment. For now, the best way to know what you bought is to keep your receipts from the store. Shoeboxes work great for this. So do smartphone cameras and a folder on your hard drive. There are also mobile apps that track receipts for you, and may even try to OCR the data for you. I'd say you have a couple options that differ by the amount of time required. Option 1: Export your checking/credit card ledgers from your banks for the unaccounted for periods you mention then import them into GNUcash.  They won't be categorized, but it's a fairly simple task to go through and categorize the main ones.  Anything else can be categorized in an 'unaccounted for' account and either properly categorized over time at a later date or just left unaccounted for. Option 2: Make one entry in each of your liabilities and assets that is also part of the 'unaccounted for' expense account, but contains the number required to balance your accounts now.  This is by far the easiest and will allow you to start with a clean slate now but keep your prior records in the same ledger.   Option 3: Start a new ledger with the same account/expense structure as your previous ledger.  From here on out, you'd open this GNUCash file and start fresh.  Also quick and easy but there is no way to look at the old ledger and run reports unless you open that separately.  I actually do this every couple of years as a way to force me to clear out obsolete accounts and trim the fat since GNUcash can take a long time to open when the ledger contains many years of transactions. Personally, it is the tenant's stupidity to leave cash and not get a receipt. If it were me, I would demand payment. But then $750 to me is a lot more than it may be to others. This is entirely a personal decision, legally I don't think the tenant has a leg to stand on because they have no proof they actually paid you, regardless of how or where they 'left it'. The best way is to retain the charge slips. After you are done for the month you can discard them.   Alternatively if you are using any of the personal finance tool or a simple XLS to track exepnses, it would be easy to figure out what you actually spent and what was not yours. "Perhaps you can track your VAT amounts in a Liability account.  Using a tax liability account is a common thing in accounting. To do this, when you receive money, split the transaction such that your actual revenue (which you will keep after VAT remittance) goes into an Asset account, and the amount you will eventually have to pay back to the state goes into a Liability account.  Later, when you pay the VAT back to the state, your transaction will effectively ""pay back"" the liability, with one end of your double-entry decreasing the funds in your checking account, and the other end decreasing the funds in your tax liability account. Having said that, I've found that there are many shortcomings in the Cash Flow report, and I'm not sure that using a tax liability account (which I think is the Right Thing to do) will necessarily solve this problem for you..."