Petty cash on set: envelopes, receipts and reconciliation

Why cash still exists

Sets run on small purchases: last-minute expendables, a hardware run, crafty, parking, tips. Nobody issues a purchase order for fourteen dollars of gaffer tape, and no vendor wants a credit card for a cash-and-carry errand. Petty cash exists for the spend that is too small to route through accounts payable and too frequent to pre-approve.

Because it bypasses the approval chain, it's also the money most likely to vanish from the record. The whole discipline of petty cash is making cash behave like a transaction — a named custodian, a stated float, receipts for every dollar, and a reconciliation that closes each envelope before the money is forgotten.

The envelope is the unit

Cash is issued to a person, not to the production in general. That person — the envelope holder — signs for a float at the start, spends against it, and returns receipts and unspent cash at the end. At any moment, the envelope's math should hold: float equals receipts plus remaining cash. When it doesn't, the difference is money that has left with no record of what it bought.

Receipts are non-negotiable, and the standard is the same as any other spend: date, vendor, amount, what it was for. A missing receipt isn't a formality problem — it's an unaccounted cost the production cannot deduct, cannot claim against an incentive, and cannot defend in an audit.

• •Issue the float to a named custodian, per envelope, with a stated purpose.
• •Float = receipts + remaining cash, checked at every reconciliation.
• •Every dollar carries a receipt: date, vendor, amount, purpose.

Per diem is not petty cash

Per diems are often distributed from the same cash box, but they are a different instrument: a meal and incidentals allowance paid to a person for a day or week of work, usually tax-free within published rates. Petty cash is reimbursement for purchases; per diem is an allowance for living. The books treat them differently — per diems flow through payroll or travel reporting, purchases flow through accounts payable — and conflating the two muddies both records.

Track per diem by person and by day, with the rate and the days covered recorded at issuance. The production that pays per diems out of an untracked cash box discovers at wrap that it cannot say who was paid for which days.

Reconcile before it's history

The failure pattern is always the same: envelopes go out, production runs, receipts pile up in a folder, and reconciliation becomes a wrap-week archaeology project — if it happens at all. Reconciled at the time, each envelope takes minutes: check the math, photograph or file the receipts, post the spend to the right budget category, return or roll the balance.

Posted at the time, petty cash behaves like any other actual in the cost report — small purchases showing up in the right categories the same week they happened. Posted at wrap, it lands as a lump nobody can attribute, and the categories it touched were quietly understated the whole shoot.

How Clarice handles this

Clarice runs petty cash as envelopes, not a cash box: each envelope has a custodian, a float and a status, and every expense against it carries its category, vendor, amount and an uploaded receipt. Per diem tracking sits beside it, by person and day, with its own rate logic and export.

Reconciliation is continuous — the envelope's balance and receipt coverage are visible while the shoot is running, and returned spend posts to the budget lines and the general ledger automatically. A blank printable form exists for custodians who work on paper and settle at the office, and the audit export includes the envelopes with their receipts attached.