12 BULLETIN 178, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
PETTY CASH. 
Should it be necessary to keep a small amount of cash on hand to 
cover petty cash disbursements, the Imprest System of handling 
these disbursements should be adopted. 
A petty cash fund should be created to liquidate items not con- 
veniently paid by check, by drawing a check for an even amount in 
favor of the petty cash fund or the cashier, sufficient to meet the 
requirements for petty cash expenditures for a certain period, say, 
one week. A receipt should be taken for each disbursement, and a 
record of these payments should be made on a specially ruled en- 
velope or in a petty cashbook. At all times the cashier must have 
in the petty cash fund the difference between the original amount of 
the check and the total of the items disbursed, as shown by the 
receipts. From time to time, as the amount of cash becomes small, 
the receipts are totaled and presented to the proper official for 
approval. A check is then drawn for the total amount of these 
receipts, which are charged to t]ie proper accounts. The petty cash 
fund is thus restored to its original size. The receipts are then ini- 
tialed and placed in an envelope, which is filed away so that the 
receipts are accessible for auditing at the end of the year. 
THE EXPENSE ACCOUNT. 
Some organizations segregate their expense items under but two 
or three headings, using general expense as a miscellaneous account 
to which all expense items not coming under one of the few specific 
expense headings are charged ; others go to the other extreme of 
opening many ledger accounts to make a segregation of the expense 
account, thus increasing the work in the ledger materially both in 
posting and in abstracting the trial balance. A better plan is to 
provide but one column for expense in each book of original entry, 
where needed, notation being made in the " Explanation " column 
indicating the segregation to be made. For the distribution of these 
items, a columnar book large enough to allow a column for each ac- 
count is used, the headings being inserted for such segregations as 
desired, such as salaries, labor, inspector's expense, postage, adver- 
tising, telegrams and telephone, repairs, office supplies, and sta- 
tionery. 
It is not enough to show that certain disbursements were made 
on account of expense, but proper segregation should be made in 
order to show the expenditures for each class. This is especially true 
of subclassifications kept for statistical use, and comparisons of one 
year with another. These comparisons are useless unless all charges 
are entered under similar heads from year to year. 
