At my grandmother's house there was a notebook.
It wasn't hidden, and it didn't look important. It lived in a kitchen drawer, next to the scissors and the rubber bands, its cover worn soft at the corners.
Inside were the accounts of the house.
A column of entries written in pencil, figures lined up on the right, a total at the foot of every page. Groceries, electricity, the cobbler, the money slipped to a grandson.
Nothing sophisticated. And yet my grandmother, who hadn't gone to the good schools and had never once heard the word "net worth", always knew two things with absolute precision.
How much she had spent.
And how much she had left.
They're the two things that today, with a smartphone in our pocket and our statement a fingertip away, almost nobody can state with the same certainty.
This article is a small act of respect towards that notebook. And a way of saying that we invented nothing: we only tried not to forget.
The envelopes, or budgeting before budgets
Before the notebook, many households ran on something even simpler. Envelopes.
It worked like this. The wages came in — often in cash, in a real pay packet — and that money was divided straight away into other envelopes.
One envelope for the rent. One for food. One for the bills. One for the children's clothes. One, small, set aside and left alone.
When an envelope was empty, it was empty. You didn't dip into the rent envelope to buy something you didn't need. That one was sacred.
Today we'd call it a category budget: deciding in advance how much goes to each line of spending, and staying inside that limit.
We rediscovered it as though it were news. We sell it as a technique. Our grandmothers did it with paper envelopes and a pencil, and it worked for a reason that still holds.
The limit was physical. You could see it. When the envelope grew thin, you felt it between your fingers.
That's exactly the trouble with a modern current account: it's one single, enormous envelope in which everything blends together. The rent, dinner out, the savings and the groceries all sit inside the same number. And one number that blends everything tells you nothing about where you're heading.
The envelopes separated. And separating is the first act of awareness.
In Cashfulness you can set monthly budgets by category — today's envelopes. When you get close to a category's limit, a quiet notice tells you so: "the Home and utilities budget is nearly at its limit". No red alarm, no telling off. Just the information that the thickness of an envelope used to give you.
The notebook, or writing everything down
Then came the notebook. And here's the first great lesson we've lost.
My grandmother wrote everything down.
Not just the big expenses. The bread too. The newspaper too. The tip to the delivery boy too. Nothing was too small to make it onto the page.
To us that looks like pointless effort. Three euros of bread — why bother recording it?
Modern apps, in fact, do the opposite: they encourage you to look only at the spending "that counts", to skip the details, to simplify. They give you the big picture and round the rest away.
It sounds convenient. It's a trap.
Because the expense you don't write down is the expense you don't see. And the sum of all the expenses you don't see is precisely the gap between what you think you spend and what you actually spend.
Those three euros of bread, multiplied by every day, by every small line ignored, become hundreds of euros a month vanishing without a trace. Not because you're a spendthrift. Because nobody ever wrote them down.
My grandmother knew this by instinct. She wrote everything down because she knew the devil isn't in the big expenses — those you decide with a clear head. It's in the hundred little ones you never look at.
There's a principle in Cashfulness that I call complete honesty: the app won't let you "lie by omission". The €1.20 coffee goes into the accounts too, exactly as it went into my grandmother's notebook. Not to make you feel guilty about the coffee — coffee is as sacred as the rent envelope — but because only by recording everything is the final number true.
Once you did it in pencil, in the evening, before bed.
Today you record it in a few seconds as it happens, and the total updates itself.
The tool has changed. The principle is identical: write everything down, or the notebook lies.
The total at the foot of the page, or always knowing what's left
And then there's the thing that still strikes me most.
At the foot of every page, my grandmother drew a line and did the sum.
She knew, at any moment, how much she had left. Not by feel. Not "I think we're doing all right this month". A number. Written. Up to date.
That number was her coordinate.
At sea there's a gesture called the position fix: marking on the chart the exact place of the hull at a given instant. Not where you want to go, not where you think you are. Where you actually are, right now. (I wrote about it at length here.)
My grandmother took her position fix every evening, with a pencil line at the foot of the page.
We, with all the technology we have, often can't say it. We open the banking app, see the account balance, and believe that's our position fix. It isn't.
The account balance is one single envelope that blends everything, as I said. The real coordinate is something else: it's your net worth — everything you have minus everything you owe. The accounts, the possessions, the savings on one side; the debts, the instalments, the mortgage on the other. The subtraction between the two is your actual position.
My grandmother had neither a mortgage nor ETFs, and her subtraction fitted on one page. Our lives are more tangled: a house with a mortgage still running, a car worth less than when you bought it, a few investments, a credit card.
Keeping all of that up to date in pencil, every evening, would be a second job today.
But the gesture that matters is the same. And in Cashfulness every movement you record updates that coordinate automatically. You do the shopping and note it down; the total at the foot of the page — your net worth — redoes itself.
The pencil line is drawn by the software, in real time. All you have to do is look at it.
The technical secret your grandmother used without knowing it
Now let me tell you something that would have made my grandmother laugh.
That notebook of hers, made of columns and totals, was the household version of a technique that businesses all over the world have been using for six hundred years.
It's called double-entry bookkeeping.
It was set down in black and white in 1494 by a mathematician friar, Luca Pacioli, in a treatise that is still the foundation of accounting for every company on the planet. The idea is elegant: every movement of money is recorded twice, on two sides that balance each other. One side is called Debit, the other Credit.
They're not debts, mind you — they're simply the labels for the two sides of one and the same record. If you buy bread, on one side money leaves the account, on the other the bread comes in (or, more usually, the expense you've made). The two sides have to come to the same amount.
And here's the magic, the very thing my grandmother did without giving it a name: if you add up every Debit and every Credit in your book, you must get the exact same number.
If it comes out right, everything holds.
If it doesn't, there's an error somewhere — and you know straight away, before it grows into a problem.
My grandmother looked for that equilibrium in her own way. She'd recount the cash, compare it with the notebook's total, and if the two numbers didn't match she wouldn't go to bed until she'd found where the missing lira had ended up. That was her balancing: the check that the accounts stand up.
She didn't know she was doing double-entry. She just did it, because it was the only way to have a number you could trust.
We had rather forgotten that rigour. The "easy" apps threw it out in the name of convenience: they categorise the movements on your account, draw you a pretty chart, but they balance nothing — and so the number they show you is an approximation, not a truth.
Cashfulness makes the opposite choice. It keeps the double-entry engine exactly as Pacioli intended it, and as my grandmother applied it without knowing. It just doesn't make you carry the weight: underneath, the accounts balance themselves; on top, you see money in, money out and "it all adds up". The real words — Debit, Credit, balancing — are there if you want them, explained the first time you meet them, never taken for granted. (I've described how it works, in plain words, here.)
Six hundred years of rigour. Brought home without watering them down.
Exactly as she did.
What we lost, and what we can take back
So, what did old-fashioned home accounting know that we've forgotten?
Three things, and none of them requires going back to the pencil.
It knew how to separate. The envelopes kept spending distinct, because one number that blends everything doesn't orient you.
It knew how to write everything down. The bread too, the tip too, because the expense you don't record is the one that quietly empties you.
And it knew how to always know what's left. The total at the foot of the page, every evening: the coordinate, not the feeling.
There's no nostalgia in this. I'm not saying things were better when they were worse.
My grandmother would have given an arm for a tool that did the sums for her, that kept the accounts aligned between the kitchen and the wallet, that spared her an evening hunting for one lira.
The labour of the notebook wasn't a virtue. It was the price to be paid for having a figure you could trust.
What we can take back isn't the labour. It's the discipline underneath it. The respect for the true figure, down to the last cent. The habit of looking at the coordinate instead of going by feel.
Cashfulness, in the end, is that notebook and pencil with the sums done for you. The same rigour as my grandmother's and Luca Pacioli's, without the evening lost to making the cash box balance.
Money is a tool for buying time and freedom — not a dream to chase, nor an enemy to fight. My grandmother had worked that out without reading it anywhere. She kept the accounts not out of anxiety, but to be at peace: to sleep knowing where she was, and how much she had left.
It's the same calm we're trying to give back.
If you still have a grandmother's notebook in a drawer somewhere, open it. You'll find more financial wisdom in there than in half the articles going round online.
Including, perhaps, this one.
— Vittorio