Financial detective work
7 February 2024 02:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeAfter an awful lot of poring through months' worth of receipts, I've managed to identify a point at which a twenty-pound note definitely appeared 'out of thin air' without being withdrawn from the bank, on the 16th of October when I was buying batteries and paid for them with a £20 note when according to my calculations I only had £4.18 in my wallet, which was not enough to be able to afford them out of the change I had on hand. I do sort of vaguely recall the episode; I have a feeling I was going to pay for them with a Visa card and for some reason couldn't or decided against it -- maybe the card machine was not working, maybe I was going to ask for 'cashback' and they said they didn't do it -- and I think I may have suddenly remembered that I did in fact have a backup note in my *other* wallet (from the long-lost days when that used to be my 'personal' money for my private amusements as opposed to the housekeeping; it has been all housekeeping for rather a long time now) and have decided to use that instead.
And I think the 'two-wallet problem' may perhaps account for the further discrepancy that has arisen over Christmas, when I transferred my last remaining £10 note into my 'private' wallet, went on holiday expecting not to need to spend any money, had to withdraw thirty pounds in an emergency, and spent some of that while obviously receiving change from it. So there was some change left behind in the 'housekeeping', as I only took the note, and other change that ended up in the 'private' wallet and is still there, since I didn't transfer it back when I returned.
I can account for at least 24.55 of that holiday £30, and possibly 27.75 of it (but I seem to remember that small purchase was made with the change I already had in my wallet rather than by breaking a note!), and as I have absolutely zero idea how much change was in there before I started we shall never get any closer than that. I can account for two of the notes, and think I must have transferred the remaining tenner back into the housekeeping when I got home, since I subsequently spent a further 8.56 before running out of cash and having to pay 3.49 by debit card at the Post Office! (The detective work is aided by the fact that I know I consistently spend the small change first, so if I hand over a note that means that I didn't have enough coins at that point to pay the sum in question...)
So after much adding up both forwards and backwards (i.e. starting from the amount of cash currently in hand and working out how much I had at the point when I last withdrew money!) on many sheets of paper, I seem to have got the totals to agree with a discrepancy of only 50p over a period of five and a half months, and with all the various notes recorded in receipts as having been handed over the till accounted for (i.e. I could see that I would logically have had such a note in my possession at that date and have been obliged to break into it due to a shortage of smaller change). It really did *not* help that a lot of the dates originally got written down out of order by several days as I tried to track the assortment of receipts, chequebook stubs, bank statements and cash spending -- hence the eventual necessity to operate on separate sheets rather than directly in the acccount book!
The very obvious moral, of course, is that I need to keep my accounts up to date while I can still remember what was going on, instead of letting them go, secure in the knowledge that I have 'everything written down', and then transferring them to the computer in a massive task every six months or so! (Doing them directly into the computer is really not an option; I can carry a small notebook around with me and note things down on the spur of the moment, but there is no way I am going to sit down and run spreadsheet software every time I come back from market, psychologically speaking.)
And I think the 'two-wallet problem' may perhaps account for the further discrepancy that has arisen over Christmas, when I transferred my last remaining £10 note into my 'private' wallet, went on holiday expecting not to need to spend any money, had to withdraw thirty pounds in an emergency, and spent some of that while obviously receiving change from it. So there was some change left behind in the 'housekeeping', as I only took the note, and other change that ended up in the 'private' wallet and is still there, since I didn't transfer it back when I returned.
I can account for at least 24.55 of that holiday £30, and possibly 27.75 of it (but I seem to remember that small purchase was made with the change I already had in my wallet rather than by breaking a note!), and as I have absolutely zero idea how much change was in there before I started we shall never get any closer than that. I can account for two of the notes, and think I must have transferred the remaining tenner back into the housekeeping when I got home, since I subsequently spent a further 8.56 before running out of cash and having to pay 3.49 by debit card at the Post Office! (The detective work is aided by the fact that I know I consistently spend the small change first, so if I hand over a note that means that I didn't have enough coins at that point to pay the sum in question...)
So after much adding up both forwards and backwards (i.e. starting from the amount of cash currently in hand and working out how much I had at the point when I last withdrew money!) on many sheets of paper, I seem to have got the totals to agree with a discrepancy of only 50p over a period of five and a half months, and with all the various notes recorded in receipts as having been handed over the till accounted for (i.e. I could see that I would logically have had such a note in my possession at that date and have been obliged to break into it due to a shortage of smaller change). It really did *not* help that a lot of the dates originally got written down out of order by several days as I tried to track the assortment of receipts, chequebook stubs, bank statements and cash spending -- hence the eventual necessity to operate on separate sheets rather than directly in the acccount book!
The very obvious moral, of course, is that I need to keep my accounts up to date while I can still remember what was going on, instead of letting them go, secure in the knowledge that I have 'everything written down', and then transferring them to the computer in a massive task every six months or so! (Doing them directly into the computer is really not an option; I can carry a small notebook around with me and note things down on the spur of the moment, but there is no way I am going to sit down and run spreadsheet software every time I come back from market, psychologically speaking.)