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 ledger has two views.

The **public ledger** on the Impact page shows the aggregate donation to WFP for each month since we launched. Each row: date the donation cleared, total dollar amount, total meal count, and a reference number issued by ShareTheMeal. 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 funded each month. Same reference numbers, 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 initiate one aggregate transfer to WFP via ShareTheMeal. ShareTheMeal returns a confirmation with a unique reference number, usually within 30 minutes.

The meal count for the month equals the transfer amount divided by ShareTheMeal's per-meal cost ($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, WFP'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.

Second, one big number with one reference is auditable in a way that thousands of small ones isn't. If you want to verify our September donation, you email ShareTheMeal with one reference number, not fifty thousand.

What a receipt looks like.

A representative ledger row: 2026-07-31 · $96,412 · 120,515 meals · ref 4471-A.

Interpretation: On July 31 2026, we transferred $96,412 to WFP via ShareTheMeal, which at $0.80/meal funded 120,515 meals. The reference number 4471-A can be independently verified with ShareTheMeal'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 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 meal donation.

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 batch runs, no contribution is made. If it happens after (rare, since the batch runs 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 batch. You paid for the month; you fund the meals for the month.