I'm just hoping there's going to be a 'purse' or 'wallet' item for dwarves soon enough. Like quivers are for bolts, except then for every dwarf and for coins. That should make the economy and coins more bearable.
Also, make it out of rope reed cloth, by the time the economy sets in people will have plenty of rope reed cloth and/or elf corpses. Maybe some leather(All the low priced leather from human caravans..) and maybe metal(A platinium wallet with steel spikes? Dwarves will love that.)
Or they could just use their pockets?
Yeah, but you really want cutpurses to have something to cut.
Well, I have some problems with using coins, even with a purse.
1) Will coins have mass? This doesn't mean too much normally, but consider that some of my pump operating, book keeping dwarves have 5-digit accounts... That is a LOT of coins to be hefting around on a shoulder strap.
2) Will coins teleport to their owner as they perform their work? If not, then you still have the problem of dwarves quitting their jobs to go grab more money from the pile. How far away is that money pile from every single work station? Just thinking of the inefficiencies makes me shake my head.
1) Not really issue if they only carry limited amount and keep rest in coffer (as they should). Besides, you could upgrade their lifestyle to level where it matches their income (ooooh, how nice, i got masterwork bed! WHAT!? My rent got increased!?)
Also, building well-stocked shops with luxuries ought to empty their accounts too.
Last, but not least, I hope for aditional currency grades (i.e. precious gems acting as ~ 100¤ to 1000¤)
2) Frankly, managing payments sounds awesome.
I would envision book keeper or manager dwarf to get aditional duty of having to distribute salasier every season. He would either just hunt down dwarves and hand them money or just sit in office with sack of coins and let others come to him and claim their paycheck.
Alternate possiblity is to use existing squad structure: organize civilian dwarves to squads which appoints suqad leader to "manager" or "foreman" position that is responsible for salary distribution (and work orders).
That way, if you have useless dwarf you have another possiblity beyond drafting him to army: promote him to management, let him handle paychecks for actually usefull dwarves!