The question is never what you earned, it is where it went LEDGER

A cash book is the record you are actually required to keep

Money in, money out, a date, a category and who it was. For a self-employed person, a club treasurer or a small charity, that is the record, and it is what an accountant will work from at the end of the year. Everything more elaborate is usually somebody selling a subscription for a feature that gets used twice.

The things that make a cash book useful are unglamorous. Enter transactions as they happen rather than in a panic in January, because the detail you cannot reconstruct later is not the amount (that is on the statement); it is what the payment was for. Put the counterparty in properly, because “transfer” tells you nothing in eight months. Use few enough categories that you can remember them, and the same ones every year, or the comparison that makes the numbers mean something is not available.

Everything is worked out from the entries in front of you

Nothing on the page is derived from anything you cannot see. That sounds like a small property and it is the one that decides whether a disagreement about a number can be resolved.

When a total looks wrong in a system that computes it somewhere you cannot inspect, your options are to trust it or to rebuild the whole thing by hand. When every figure traces to rows you are looking at, you find the row. That matters most in exactly the situation these records exist for: a treasurer facing a question at an AGM, or anybody being asked where a figure came from.

It is also why the export is the point. Everything lives in this browser on this device until you export it, so export at the end of every session and keep the file the way you would keep a paper cash book. A browser's storage is not a filing system, and clearing site data clears this.

Reconcile against the bank, monthly

The cash book is a record of what you think happened. The bank statement is a record of what did. They differ, always, and the differences are where the useful information is: a payment you recorded and that never left, a fee nobody told you about, a duplicate, a standing order for something cancelled two years ago, a customer payment that never arrived.

Do it monthly rather than annually. A discrepancy found within a few weeks is a question you can still answer and a payment you can still chase. The same discrepancy found in January is a line item nobody remembers, and the usual resolution is to write it off, which is the expensive answer.

RECONCILE matches the two files against each other and shows what is in one and not the other. Alongside: INVOICES bills without handing your client list to a service, NETTERMS chases what has not been paid, SETTLE works out who owes whom in as few payments as possible, and RECEIPTS keeps the paperwork that backs each line. Nothing here is uploaded.