Finance → Payables → Expense Wallets → /expense-wallets Beta
An expense wallet is a fund a property manager tops up and then draws down as they pay expenses. It gives petty cash a ledger: every top-up and every spend is recorded, the balance is always derivable, and you cannot spend money the wallet does not have.
The list
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Wallet | Name — make it say what the fund is for ("Maintenance petty cash"). |
| Bank Account | The account backing it. |
| Currency | The wallet's currency. |
| Balance | Top-ups less spends. |
| Overdraft Limit | How far below zero the wallet may go, if your policy allows any. |
| Spendable | Balance plus any permitted overdraft — the figure a spend is actually checked against. |
| Status | Active or inactive. |
Creating a wallet
New expense wallet
From the list, create the wallet: name, bank account, currency.
Set the overdraft limit
Default is none. Only allow an overdraft if your finance policy genuinely permits spending ahead of funding.
Top it up
A wallet with no funds cannot spend — the block is hard, not a warning.
Topping up
A top-up adds funds to the wallet. Record the amount, the date, a reference and a note.
Top-ups are source-agnostic by design: a manually entered top-up and a top-up sourced from real money movement are the same kind of record, differing only in their source and status. That is what lets an organisation start with typed-in balances and move to funded top-ups later without re-doing anything downstream.
Spending
Two ways to spend, both writing the same underlying records:
Quick spend
For small, immediate payments. Capture: paid to, amount, category, reference, receipt and a note. This is the petty-cash experience — one dialog, done.
Pay an expense
For payments against an existing expense record. Select the expense and pay it from the wallet. The expense is settled and the wallet balance falls.
Either way, the spend creates a real expense and an outgoing payment on the ledger, so it appears in the expenses list and posts to the general ledger through the normal path. A wallet is not a parallel expense system.
The insufficient-funds guard
Spending more than the wallet's spendable amount is blocked server-side, atomically. The check happens at the moment of spending, not in the form, so two people spending at once cannot both pass a stale balance check.
Receipts
Receipts can be attached at the point of spending. Expense wallet receipts are stored with the transaction, so a month-end review does not depend on someone's shoebox.
The wallet detail page
Opening a wallet shows:
- the current balance, overdraft limit and spendable amount;
- the ledger — every top-up and spend in order, with references and notes;
- the bound bank account;
- the wallet's spend actions.
Reconciling a wallet
Compare wallet balance to the fund
Cash on hand (or the earmarked account balance) should equal the wallet balance.
Check every spend has a receipt
Spends without receipts are the first thing an auditor will ask about.
Check categories
Miscategorised spends land in the wrong expense account and distort the P&L.
Investigate a negative balance
If overdraft is not permitted and the balance is negative, something bypassed the guard — escalate rather than adjusting it.
Wallets vs expenses vs tenant wallet
Three different things share the word "wallet" or the idea of held money:
| Concept | What it is |
|---|---|
| Expense wallet | Your operating float for paying costs. Covered here. |
| Expense | A cost owed or paid to a vendor. See Expenses. |
| Tenant wallet amount | Money a resident paid you that is not yet allocated to an invoice. See Allocations. |
They never interact. Money a tenant overpays does not fund your maintenance float.
Permissions and control
Wallets are finance records: creating them, setting overdraft limits and topping them up are administrator-level actions, while spending is normally granted more widely. Keep the two apart — the whole control value of a wallet is that the person spending is not the person funding.