If you have just a few cash expenses, and you have invoices or vouchers for all of them, then you can just put them in a concertina folder and we will deal with them. You might also be able to pay all your expenses by credit card, in which case your bookkeeping will be done for you. This page is therefore perhaps not as important as the equivalent income page.

On the other hand, if you pay wages in cash, then you will need to keep a record. We have a day book for cash expenses which resembles the cash sales day book, and you may download it and use it. We use different colours and a different typeface to distinguish it.

We ask you to work out and add a sheet total at the bottom of each page, which we will use to check when we enter your expenses into our system. If you give us a big pile of expense sheets, then we have an AutoContra system which we use to check the subtotal on each sheet before we work out the correct grand total of expenses.

We do not ask you to double check your addition by adding upwards as well, but you might like to do this informally anyway. We want to emphasise that sales are more important than expenses, so we need to take extra steps to get them right and satisfy ourselves that sales are correctly and completely stated. With expenses, we do not need to fret about a big pile of petrol receipts, for example. We just enter them as accurately as we can and then count the number of entries and the number of receipts in bulk. It would be silly to go to town on petrol receipts while overlooking unrecorded sales. Accountants call this “materiality”. Fifty two petrol receipts at £20.01 each totals £1,040.52 which could be just one forgotten sales receipt.

Here is what typical cash expenses might look like. The two arrows at the bottom right indicate that the total of 711.62 has been checked by adding both downwards and upwards. This is optional. Every eighth ruled line is a bit thicker in order to assist our accounts clerk with typing it in to our system.

We can e-mail you a spreadsheet to keep the records if you ask, and its use is free to all our clients. For the time being we are aiming to keep it out of the hands of our competitors, so it will be available by e-mail only.