Plain Lab · logbook

Cash Book

Eighty-eight ruled ledger pages for receipts, payments and a running balance, with fourteen pages of notes and six of periodic reflection behind them.

Specification

Trim: 148 × 210 mm · 5.827 × 8.268 in
Pages: 120
Leaves: 60
Sheets: 30
Signatures: 6 × 20pp
Spine: 6.86 mm
Paper: white
Ruling: lined
Ruling pitch: 7.14 mm · 20.25 pt · 9/32 in
Rows per page: 24

Eighty-eight pages of ledger, ruled lined, twenty-four lines to a page. Each line carries the date, the particulars, what came in, what went out, and the balance after that line. A cash book is only as good as the last figure carried forward, and a spreadsheet with no paper backup has a way of vanishing the one week you actually needed to show it to someone.

Fourteen pages of plain ruled notes come after the ledger, for the explanation a balance column has no space for: why a payment was late, what a receipt was actually for, which entry got queried. Six shorter reflection pages close the working section, meant for a monthly or quarterly look back rather than a daily line.

It will not reconcile your accounts for you, and it carries no formula to check your arithmetic. What it gives you is one place where every entry sits in the order it happened, which is most of what a cash book was ever for.

What is inside

Ledger: 88pp; One line per transaction, so the balance is never more than a page away from where it went wrong.
Notes: 14pp; Plain ruled, for the explanation behind an entry that a balance column has no room for.
Reflection: 6pp; A shorter page for a periodic look back, separate from the daily ledger line.
Reference: 6pp; Weight and length tables worked from definitions, with emergency numbers checked against two sources.
Last leaf: 1pp; A pen-test page at the very back, so it is not the ledger's last real page that takes the hit.

The film

Page by page

A vertical film from our own bench — this page contacts nobody's server to play it, and downloads nothing until you press play.

A vertical film, 52 seconds: the cover, the ruling page, then 5 reference pages. Synthesised ambient bed, no dialogue — captions in three languages.

Real pages

Five pages from the Cash Book laid out as cards: a ruled ledger page, a section divider, a plain notes page, a reflection page, and the pen test page. — Five pages rendered straight from the print file: a ledger page ruled for date and particulars, a divider, the plain notes section, a reflection page, and the pen-test leaf at the back. A cash book only earns its name if the balance column gets carried forward every single page. Miss one carry-forward and the whole ledger is wrong from that line on.

Specification card listing the Cash Book contents: eighty-eight ledger pages, fourteen notes pages, six reflection pages, one hundred and twenty pages total, A5 trim, six signatures of twenty. — Eighty-eight ledger pages, ruled lined at 7.14 mm, twenty-four lines to a page, for the date, the particulars, what came in, what went out, and the balance after. Fourteen pages of plain ruled notes for anything a running total cannot hold. Six reflection pages at the back for a periodic look at where the money actually went. Twelve pages of reference and furniture close the book, one hundred and twenty pages total, A5, six signatures of twenty.

Made at the Hibrkraft bindery, Bogor · about the maker

Books that sit alongside it

Accounting NotesWorks alongsideshares accountant
Cash Flow PlannerWorks alongsideshares accountant, record-keeping
Evening LedgerWorks alongsideshares accountant, record-keeping
Expense InsertWorks alongsideshares record-keeping
Gratitude LedgerWorks alongsideshares accountant, record-keeping
Inventory LedgerWorks alongsideshares accountant, record-keeping
IT Asset and Change LogWorks alongsideshares record-keeping
Machine Log NotebookWorks alongsideshares record-keeping

Questions

What does each ledger page record?

The date, the particulars, receipts, payments and the balance carried forward.

How big is it?

A5, 148 x 210 mm, one hundred and twenty pages, 6.86 mm across the spine.

What ruling are the ledger pages?

Lined, 7.14 mm pitch, which is 9/32 inch, twenty-four lines to the page.

Is it dated?

No. Start it the day you open the till, the account, or the year.

What are the reflection pages for?

A shorter page for a periodic look back at where the money went, separate from the daily ledger line.

Is it double-entry?

No. It is a single running ledger: date, particulars, receipt, payment, balance. Double-entry bookkeeping needs a chart of accounts a printed page cannot carry.