Understanding the meal ledger.

The meal ledger is the most important page on the LADLE website. It's also the least self-explanatory if you haven't read the mechanics. This guide is the tour.

The current state — pre-partnership.

Our future hunger-relief partner is our *target* partner. Their $50,000/year corporate-partnership commitment is the threshold we're building the meal fund toward. Until we cross it, the fund accrues and we publish a monthly fund report (LADLE-issued, not partner-issued). Once we cross it, meals ship at $0.80 each through the partner we select and real partner receipts publish. Every dollar earmarked today counts toward that shipment.

The ledger has two views.

The **public ledger** on the Impact page shows the aggregate meal fund balance and monthly earmark to date (zero until the first cycle closes — LADLE is pre-launch). Each row: date the month closed, dollars earmarked, meals reserved (at our working $0.80/meal estimate, re-anchored to the real figure when a partner is named), and — once the partnership activates — the partner reference number. Anyone can see this.

Your **personal ledger** — the My Table screen inside the product, once you're a subscriber — shows the specific meals your subscription reserved each month. Same monthly fund reports, filtered to your own contribution.

How the math flows.

Every subscription is $20. Of that, $8 is immediately earmarked as "meal-committed" the moment your Stripe charge clears. This earmarked pool is tracked in a separate ledger from the operating account — deliberate separation so we can't accidentally spend it on ops.

On the last calendar day of each month, we sum the meal-committed pool across all active subscriptions and publish the monthly fund report: balance held, amount added this month, cumulative meals reserved, and progress toward the $50,000/year partnership threshold. Once we cross the threshold, the same aggregated pool becomes a real transfer to the partner we select and a partner reference number populates each entry.

The meal count for the month equals the earmarked amount divided by the partner's per-meal peg ($0.80 as of publication). If they change the per-meal cost, we recalculate against the new number in the next batch.

Why the batch model.

You might expect that each individual $8 becomes its own micro-donation with its own receipt. It doesn't, for two reasons.

First (today): a single monthly close is what makes the fund auditable — one balance line, one earmark line, one meals-reserved line per month. Micro-earmarks per subscription would be unreadable.

Second (post-partnership): the partner's donation infrastructure charges fees per transfer, not per dollar transferred. Thousands of micro-donations would burn material overhead that would otherwise fund meals. One monthly aggregate transfer minimizes that loss, and one big number with one reference is auditable in a way that thousands of small ones isn't.

What a fund report row looks like.

A representative ledger row today: 2026-07-31 · $96,412 earmarked · 120,515 meals reserved · ref pending (partnership threshold).

Interpretation: On July 31 2026, we added $96,412 to the meal fund, which at the partner's $0.80/meal peg represents 120,515 meals reserved. The reference number column will populate once we cross the $50,000/year partnership threshold — until then, it reads pending by design, because we don't want to invent a partner reference that doesn't exist yet.

Post-partnership, the same row would carry a real partner reference (e.g. 4471-A) verifiable with the partner's donor support team.

Your personal share.

Your personal ledger shows your subscription's contribution to each of these monthly aggregates. If you subscribed for the whole month, that's 10 meals reserved per your $8. If you subscribed on the 15th and the month has 31 days, you're still included in that month's batch at the full 10 meals — subscriptions are billed monthly, not pro-rated to the earmark.

The three edge cases worth understanding.

**Failed payments**: if your Stripe charge fails, no earmarking happens for that month. No meal contribution counted, no meal contribution promised.

**Refunds**: if we refund your charge, the earmarking is unwound. If the refund happens before the monthly fund report closes, no contribution is made. If it happens after (rare, since the close is at end-of-month and we don't refund past-cycle), the corresponding meal count is not deducted from the historical ledger — it stays as it was reported.

**Cancellation mid-cycle**: your final month's $8 is still in that month's earmark. You paid for the month; you reserve the meals for the month.