It was shorter than reassigning the variables from the hash values.

Ah! You have lifted the coins from my eyes. I didn't quite understand why you were using scalar refs. I believe your code assumes that the hash would be initialized like:

%totals = ( 'tcash' => \$tcash,
             ... 
          );
[download]

This is reasonable if the individual scalars must exist. It would be preferable to create hash that contains the appropriate values obtained directly from the canonical source, which I imagine is probably an SQL table. So perhaps I was over-thinking the solution by trying to imagine where those several scalars came from at all.

Still, it isn't an unpleasant way to while away the hours. ;-)