Your Petty Cash User Guide

A float account is where a physical cash box or M-Pesa till gets its digital twin — everything else in this guide happens inside one.

• From Petty Cash, create an account and give it a name that says what it is — "Nairobi Branch", "Marketing Project", "Field Team Fuel" — whatever matches how your business actually splits its cash.
• Assign a custodian — the person accountable for that specific float’s balance, day to day.
• Tag it by branch, department, or project if your business runs more than one — each account keeps its own balance, custodian, and history, never mixed with another.
• Set a low-balance threshold while you’re at it — the number below which you want a warning, before the float actually runs dry.
• Create as many accounts as your business genuinely needs. There is no limit built in beyond what makes sense to manage.

Anyone who needs petty cash for a real business expense starts here — a single-screen request, not a WhatsApp message to whoever happens to be free.

• Open New Request, choose the float account it should draw from, and enter the amount, the category, and what it is for.
• Save it as a draft if you are not ready to send it, or submit it straight away — a submitted request moves into the approval queue automatically.
• You can track your own request from submission through to settlement at any time — no need to ask anyone whether it has been looked at yet.
• A very small request can be configured to auto-approve below a set amount, so genuinely trivial spend does not need to wait on a manager’s attention.

Every request routes to whoever holds approval authority for that amount — decided by rules your business sets, not by who happens to be in the office.

• Open a pending request to see the amount, the requester, the category, and what it is for, then approve or reject it.
• A rejection asks for a reason, and the requester can correct and resubmit rather than starting over from nothing.
• You decide the approval tiers — which roles can approve which amounts — in Settings. A request above every configured tier is blocked until someone with wider authority approves it, or a matching tier is added; it never quietly falls through.
• Approved requests move to disbursement automatically — there is no separate "release the funds" step an approver has to remember.

Once a request is approved, the custodian pays it out however the business actually pays — and records it the same way regardless of method.

• Disburse by M-Pesa, bank transfer, or cash handed over in person — all three are first-class, logged on the same request, not treated as a workaround for "the system couldn’t handle it."
• A disbursement that fails to go through — a bounced M-Pesa transaction, a bank transfer that did not clear — can simply be retried on the same request, without creating a duplicate.
• Every disbursed request now shows as an outstanding advance until it is settled — visible to Finance the whole time, not just at month-end.

Once the cash is spent, the person who received it records exactly what it went on — line by line, not as one vague total.

• Add a settlement line for each thing the money was actually spent on — category, description, and the receipt or evidence for it.
• A request can be settled in stages: mark it partially settled as spend lines come in, and fully settled once every shilling is accounted for.
• If a receipt genuinely does not exist, record what evidence you do have — a photo, a written description. A missing receipt is flagged for follow-up; it does not block settlement outright, but it also is not quietly ignored.

Reconciliation is the physical spot-check — counting the actual cash or float balance against what the system expects, on a given day.

• Run a reconciliation from the account, enter the counted balance, and the system shows the variance against the expected balance automatically.
• A variance above a set size asks for a confirmation note before it is recorded — small rounding differences do not need an essay, larger ones do.
• Top up a float’s balance the same way, whenever it is replenished from the business’s main account.

Once the first float is running smoothly, most businesses add more — one per branch, department, or project, each answerable to its own custodian.

• Each account keeps its own balance, custodian, and low-balance threshold — spending on one account never touches another’s numbers.
• A low-balance warning appears on the Petty Cash overview the moment any account crosses its threshold, so nobody discovers an empty float only when they need it.
• Reassign a custodian when someone changes role or leaves — the account’s history stays intact under the new custodian, nothing resets.

Four reports cover everything an owner, manager, or accountant asks about petty cash — always built from live data, never a spreadsheet someone rebuilds by hand.

• Spend by Category — settled spend broken down by what it actually went on, so you can see where the money goes, not just how much left the float.
• Requests by Status — the volume and value of requests at every stage of the workflow, at a glance.
• Disbursement Methods — how funds were actually paid out, split by M-Pesa, bank transfer, and cash.
• Outstanding Advances — every disbursed-but-unsettled request, oldest first, so nothing sits unsettled and forgotten.
• Export any of the four for a board meeting, an audit, or your own accountant.

After the first few requests, this becomes routine — a short daily habit rather than a system to think about separately.

• Start on the Petty Cash overview — low-balance warnings and outstanding advances are the first things worth a glance each morning.
• Approve pending requests promptly so a genuine business expense is never held up waiting on a decision.
• Settle your own outstanding advances as soon as the spend is known — the longer settlement waits, the harder it is to remember what a receipt was actually for.
• Reconcile each float on whatever cadence fits your business — weekly for a fast-moving branch, monthly for a quiet project account.
• Pull a report whenever an owner, manager, or accountant needs a number — Spend by Category, Requests by Status, Disbursement Methods, or Outstanding Advances.