Money Dashboard can be an effective aid to help you manage not only your personal finances, but also keep on top of your business expenses and support you if you are filing for self-assessment tax.
Firstly, you'll need to make sure all your accounts are connected & refreshed. To be most effective, your tags will need to be up to date. In other words, make sure each transaction has one of our helpful categories assigned to it which represents what the spend or income was for.
Here are the top 3 ways our users have told us they are using Money Dashboard today to help with their personal business accounting:
1. Keep track of your business expenses
Money Dashboard cannot be a direct substitute for keeping hold of your receipts. However, it can be an effective aid to see & report on your spend.
For example, on your "Transactions" screen search all your historic spending and filter the transactions to produce specific reports for spending at merchants like the Post Office or in categories like Business Expenses.
You can also create bespoke reports by setting custom tags for your spend categories (for example TFL contactless payments on the Tube.
2. Keep track of your self-employed income
Unlike those on a fixed company salary, your income may vary month-to-month, and you may receive payments from multiple sources. On your "Transactions" screen, you can set a filter to only show incoming amounts to make it easy to identify any payments to you. This might be especially handy when it comes to calculating your taxable income.
You might also find the "Incoming vs Outgoing" graph useful for displaying everything that's coming in and going out from your business account each month.
Pro tip: If it's hard to tell the purpose of a transaction based on its description, you can update it to include a note that will help you identify it later. Just click on the current description and input your text.
3. Track & budget your expenses if you don't have a business account
If you are self-employed but don't have a business account you could use Money Dashboard to create a budget to track your income & expenditure of your tagged spend for business. You can also create custom tags (under your business expenses) to identify particular business spend categories. For example, you might create a tag for each client, or for travel you are taking for business rather than personal reasons
Pro tip: if you create a custom tag for one of your recurring expenses, you can use the "apply to similar" rule so that Money Dashboard automatically applies the correct tag for you in the future.
These are just a few ways you can use Money Dashboard to keep track of your business spending. We'd love to know if you're doing anything great that you'd be happy to share with the community. Please leave a comment below!
