When purchases are charged, it is well to open a little account with the firm in the house account book. Write the name of the firm at the head of two opposite pages. On the debit side write the purchases, their dates and prices. On the credit side, write the dates and amounts of any payments made to the firm, because on those amounts is based the firm's belief in their customer. Such accounts may often take the place of the separate accounts kept for the departments of expenditure. The butcher's account will be the meat department; the coal and wood dealer's account will be the fuel department; etc.
When purchases are charged it is easier to buy more than one can pay for, than it is when they are paid for in cash. This is the cause of the objection which some people have to "charging."
It is very needful to have a fixed time every day for attending to the housekeeping accounts. The best time is immediately after the orders for the day have been given; or immediately after the housekeeper returns from market. It is well to have a little scratch-pad hung up in the kitchen, and another on a desk in the living room, and another upstairs, on which expenditures made at irregular times can be jotted down. The used slips can be torn off each day, and the items put down in the book at the regular time for the accounts.
Accounts balanced once a week are a little trouble once a week; those kept by the month are a large trouble once a month. Accounts balanced weekly are less apt to have mistakes in them; and they are a more frequent warning against living beyond one's means.
To a young housekeeper wishing to look into the matter of account keeping, I would recommend an interesting little book by Professor Charles Waldo Haskins, called "How to Keep Household Accounts." It is agreeable as well as useful. I wish, also, to say, in this connection, that the methods of keeping household accounts suggested in this book are neither professional nor authoritative; they are merely simple ways in which accounts may be correctly kept.
Not long ago, I made bold to ask an interesting and successful business man if he kept detailed accounts. He took out of an inside pocket a worn, narrow-paged diary. In it, under each date, was recorded every cent he spent—even to cigars and organ grinders. He showed it as if he did not quite like to, and yet as if he were determined to stand up for it—somewhat as a man acknowledges an unpopular conviction. He said, "It seems awfully close—no, I mean it seems awfully careful, but I want to know."
You may guess what it was he wanted to know.