Should my helper carry cash or an e-wallet for shopping?

Either works, because the payment rail was never the real problem. What employers want from an e-wallet float is a record they can check anytime — and cash plus a shared, written-down ledger gives you exactly that, without moving the money onto a second system someone has to manage.

The e-wallet advice is really about the record

The standard employer advice is to replace the cash float with a dedicated Octopus or e-wallet, so that every transaction can be checked anytime. Read it closely: the goal is the checking, not the card. The payment rail is just the means the advice had at hand.

That distinction matters, because it means you are not choosing between trust and control — you are choosing between two ways of getting a record. One way changes the money. The other changes what happens to the information.

A dedicated e-wallet is a second system to run

A float on a card or in an app does not maintain itself. Someone has to top it up, check its balance, keep the app working, and notice when it runs dry mid-shop. In most households that someone is your helper — the e-wallet moves the record-keeping onto her, inside a system you do not share.

And the float still needs explaining. A card balance tells you what left the account; it does not tell you what the money bought, or why Tuesday cost more than Monday. The questions a cash float raises do not disappear — they just move into an app only one of you can see.

Cash plus a shared record gives you both

Keep the money simple and make the record shared. In SamaKasa the float stays cash — handed over the same day each week — and the record lives where both of you can see it: every top-up, every spend, every receipt, and the cash-on-hand position that adds them up.

She writes the record, so it protects her as much as it informs you — an expensive week shows up as prices on receipts, not as a question mark. For sizing the float itself, see our grocery-money guide.