Keeping business and personal spending apart

If you run anything on your own, a freelance practice, a small shop, a side project, sooner or later a coffee for you and a coffee for a client end up in the same place. Untangling them in March is much worse than separating them in the first place.

The best solution is boring

A separate bank account and a separate card for the business. Pay business costs from one and personal costs from the other, and most of the problem simply never appears.

When you cannot

Sometimes the card is shared, or you pay for something business-related in a hurry from your own pocket. Then the goal is to keep the records apart even if the money was not.

• Use separate spaces for separate worlds. In Spend, a workspace is completely separate from every other one, and you can stay signed in to a personal account and a company account at once and switch between them, the way you would between two mailboxes.
• Note why, at the time. "Printer paper, studio" takes five seconds now and is impossible to reconstruct later.
• Reimburse yourself explicitly. If you paid a business cost personally, record the expense in the business and move the money on a real date, rather than letting it sit as a vague debt.

Avoid the grey zone

Cash and "I will sort it out later" are where most mix-ups begin. If a payment cannot be categorized on the spot, capture the receipt anyway and decide in the evening.

One more reason

Clean records are not only about tax. They are what let you answer the plain question "is this business actually making money?" and trust the answer.