Good news — we added cash account balances as an option. See for more details:

https://www.wesabe.com/groups/3-make-wesabe-better/discussions/1320-cash-accounts-now-can-have-balances

Nobody can track the details (coffee money, snacks, transit etc…) but you can look at your wallet at the end of the day and determine that $50 is missing. Why not be able to have a balance that can be modified?

However that whole “miscellaneous” transaction is actually really important. You see, if I pay cash for something important to track (groceries, license renewal) then I’ll want to punch it in. However once a month or, usually around payday, I just use the Quicken “Update Balance” feature to update my cash balance. I count out what’s in my wallet and change jar, roll up some change and then punch in the new number and this gives me “entertainment” for the month.

You see, I have the same goal here, I don’t want to track every penny, but at the end of the month I want to say “I’m down to 24.67, what did I spend on Entertainment?”

If you’re one of those frugal people with a great sense of money, then you’ll probably know what you spend. But most people just grab cash and then spend it and then grab more cash and spend that. Having a cash acount with $300 in it and no cash on hand is actually a reminder that you’ve definitely been spending money somewhere. Without a cash balance, there’s this big hole in my financial picture, especially if some of the cash was used for good and some for evil

The goal here is to help people with bad habits make good ones. Mindlessly withdrawing and spending cash is a popular “bad habit” so it’s probably worth making it visible.

Exactly what I was planning to do … till you have it automated.

Thanks much.

How about this: what if you associate a particular tag with a cash account? This would also allow for multiple cash accounts (think budget envelopes, or one for me and one for my spouse) per Wesabe user.

There is a way to do what you’re asking right now, although it’s too manual. Here’s how:

(1) On each of your ATM Withdrawals, tag the transaction as ‘cash atm’.
(2) Each time you make an ATM Withdrawal, add a cash transaction for the same amount, marking it as ‘earned’, and tag it ‘cash’.

Then use the cash account as you normally would. At the end of the month, compare your ‘atm’ tag spending to the ‘cash’ tag spending, and you’ll see the untracked charges.

The reason why this works is that the ATM Withdrawal is a debit on the ‘cash’ tag, and the entry you make in (2) is a credit on the ‘cash’ tag. The two together cancel each other out. Your ‘atm’ tag will show the total amount you withdrew; the ‘cash’ tag will start at $0 after each withdrawal, and then grow as you add other cash transaction entries.

That said, we were trying to make this simpler, not harder. I think we could make the process above wholly automatic, and then show you your cash transactions so that you wouldn’t have to do the math/tagging described above yourself. Does that solve the issue?

Thanks again for the responses.

But I’m with David C-L on this. Here’s how this works for me: I take $100 from the ATM, and then four days later, I wonder where it’s gone. I tend to pay for small transactions in cash – $3 for lunch at the cafeteria, coffee at the independent coffee shop that does not offer gift cards, a couple of stamps at the post office. Mostly, I suspect, it’s snacks and small food/drink purchases, and I would really love to track them.

I do agree with you that it can be overkill to track every single penny, but David’s suggestion is a good one – you track what you can, and use a dummy transaction for what you’re missing. And like David, the thing I had really been hoping for was web access and automation: I get cash from the ATM, Wesabe moves the sum into my cash account, and I can track as much or as little as I like from there.