A ledger records what was given. It has no column for what the giving cost.
Multi-capital accounting corrects one blindness and quietly inherits another. Counting time, knowledge, relationships, and presence alongside money — the widening that 📝Types of Capital exists to perform — makes visible most of what actually sustains a community. But every column it adds still measures magnitude, and magnitude is not cost. The felt weight of a contribution is set by the ratio between what was given and what the giver had. A system that records only the numerator will read two identical entries as equal when one came from surplus and the other came from the last of it. That is not a rounding error. It is most of what makes a gift a gift.
Three unrelated traditions arrive at the same correction. In the Gospel of Mark, the wealthy put large sums into the temple treasury and a widow puts in two small coins; the teaching is that she gave more, because they gave out of abundance and she gave out of need. 📝Potlatch societies conferred standing through divestment rather than accumulation, so that a person's measure was what left their hands rather than what remained in them. Finland assesses speeding fines against income, producing tickets that differ wildly in currency in order to be equal in consequence. Scripture, gift economy, and traffic law converge on a premise none of them borrowed from the others: proportion is the honest unit.
The practical difficulty is that the correction resists becoming a field. A column recording each contributor's circumstances discloses exactly what is not the ledger's to disclose, and the people it would most protect are the first it exposes. It belongs in the preamble instead — a rule of reading rather than a unit of measure. The same contribution given from different circumstances is not the same contribution. Stated once, before the accounting begins, it asks every reader to weigh the ledger rather than sum it, and no one has to narrate their own scarcity to have it honored.
The same proportion runs in the other direction. What would land well for a person is set by what they lack, not by what they contributed, which is why an expressed desire to receive is not a claim on the ledger and not an invoice. 📝Multi-Capital Tipping becomes far more useful once both halves are read this way: contribution weighed against what the giver had, recognition weighed against what the receiver needs. Neither number means much on its own.