Plain Lab · logbook
Expense Insert
Forty-eight pages ruled into five columns, date, what for, out, in, balance, then seventy-five pages of plain notes for what a column cannot hold.
Specification
- Trim
- 127 × 177.8 mm · 5 × 7 in
- Pages
- 128
- Leaves
- 64
- Sheets
- 32
- Signatures
- 4 × 32pp
- Spine
- 7.32 mm
- Paper
- white
- Ruling
- lined
- Ruling pitch
- 7.14 mm · 20.25 pt · 9/32 in
- Rows per page
- 20
Forty-eight pages carry a five-column ledger: date, what for, out, in, balance. Five columns are not many, and that is deliberate. A running balance only stays honest if updating it is fast enough to actually happen every time, and a column you have to think about is a column you start skipping.
I have kept a balance column current for exactly nine days before letting it slide, more than once. The habit was always the same: waiting to add up a week's worth of receipts in one sitting instead of one line at a time. A ledger you update in batches is not a ledger. It is a shoebox with lines drawn on it.
Seventy-five pages of ruled notes follow the ledger, for a note on why an entry looks the way it does, or for anything with no column at all. The book does not total the balance for you. A wrong sum written by hand is easier to find and fix than a wrong sum you never wrote down in the first place.
What is inside
- Ledger
- 48pp
- Five columns: date, what for, out, in, balance.
- Notes
- 75pp
- Plain ruled space for anything a five-column ledger cannot hold.
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.
Real pages
Made at the Hibrkraft bindery, Bogor · about the maker
Books that sit alongside it
- Calibration LogWorks alongsideshares record-keeping
- Cash BookWorks alongsideshares record-keeping
Questions
What are the five ledger columns?
Date, what for, out, in, balance.
Does it total the balance automatically?
No. Every figure, including the running balance, is written by hand.
Is it dated?
No. The date column carries the dates, not a printed calendar.
What are the plain notes pages for?
Anything the five columns cannot hold: a note on an unusual entry, a receipt reference, a reminder.
Does it come with a cover?
No. It is the sewn block, sized for a leather cover made separately.
Accurate accounts should be kept of every expense and of all the sales; and at the end of each week the profit should be divided.
