Via an Internet search I found how to enter business expenses paid for via personal funds - by entering these as ‘Proprietor Drawings Account’. Further reading on QuickFile said this should be in my account by default as a Sole Trader.
The problem is, it’s not setup and I’m not a Sole Trader. I run a Ltd Company as a contractor and have been entering business expenses (paid for by personal funds), then reclaiming them for years. Now I’ve just switched to QuickFile, I have no idea how to enter the expenses (and as yet, how to enter them as having been paid back to my personal funds) due to the above.
Can anyone shed light how I should be entering these business expenses that are paid for with personal funds, then how I also enter that those expenses are repaid?
If you’re operating as a limited company then you don’t have a drawings account, but the “director’s loan” plays the equivalent role. When you pay for a business purchase with your own funds you mark it as paid from the Director’s Loan account, and when the company pays you back you treat it as a bank transfer from the current account (or wherever) to the director’s loan.
– Copied from the other reply for transparency reasons –
Thanks for your quick reply!
But it’s not a directors loan as such, as a Directors Loan works the other way around - the business lending money to the person, for the person to pay that back to the company. Expenses are the opposite of that.
Are you sure? It feels very wrong to do that. Seems an oversight of QuickFile not to have an expenses mechanism.
It works both ways, if the DL “bank account” in QuickFile is showing as overdrawn then it means the company owes money to the director, if it shows a positive balance then the director owes money to the company.
If you wanted to add a separate bank account to represent expenses not yet reimbursed you could do that instead, but in my mind it makes more sense to combine the two, since if I owe money to the company (I’ve taken a director’s loan) and then I make a company purchase with my own money, surely that reduces the amount I owe rather than being a separate liability from the company’s point of view.
Question:
So if I have an expense paid for from my personal bank account of £50, you’re suggesting I mark this as a Director’s Loan Account - ‘money out’ expense?
If so, how then do I mark that as having been repaid from the Current Account?
I’ve added ‘Personal Expenses’ as the supplier name within the Current Account with a description using the same name as that I entered into the Director’s Loan Account, then mark it as paid when actually transferred from my business bank to my personal one. Does that make sense and sound correct?
Yes. Typically you would do that by creating the purchase in the normal way exactly as you would if it had been paid from the company bank account, then “log payment” on that purchase and select the DL bank account as the source of the payment (you don’t need to create a manual “money out” in the DL account if you do it this way, as “log payment” creates a pre-tagged transaction for you). The date of payment is the date when you paid the supplier, not the date your company reimbursed you.
If you’re creating the purchase through the Receipt Hub it’s even quicker - just tick the “paid” box at the bottom and select the DL account.
There’s no difference here between a purchase paid with your personal funds as a director and one paid from the company account - in both cases it’s an expense incurred by the company (not by you) and you should log it the same way, against the real supplier (no need for a fake “expenses” supplier).
When you take the repayment, the “money out” from the current account would be tagged as a bank transfer to the DL account.
I can see that following your steps, my expense shows as being a negative value amount (debit) in the DLA, not the Current Account. The Current Account still shows the correct business bank balance (as the money to pay for said expense came from personal funds - and is marked in the DLA). Please note, this purchase doesn’t show under the Current Account, I can only see if by clicking ‘Purchases’ or clicking into the DLA.
So this now needs to be repaid. In the real world, I login to my business banking, pay myself back the outstanding amount to my personal account. Now how would I mark this as having been paid back so that the Current Account shows the purchase and debits the money from the total?
… and that’s exactly what you do in QuickFile too - the “money out” of the current account is tagged as a transfer to the DL account.
Think of the overdrawn DL balance as representing “money I have lent to the company that the company has not yet repaid” - that’s effectively what you’re doing when you use your own private funds to pay for company purchases, you’re “lending” money to the company which it immediately uses to pay its supplier.
I’m sorry but I’m not sure what you mean. At some point the company repays this amount to me, and this is where I’m lost now.
So far, we’ve marked a purchase as being from private funds. This only displays by clicking into the DLA (not visible in the Current Account). I can’t click anything on this entry to change it, it shows the £ total as ‘money out’, nor can I see how to mark those funds as now having been paid by the company back to me (should something also show in the ‘money in’ column when done correctly?)
The Current Account still shows the £ total and I can’t see how to make this reduce without making up another purchase entry to reduce that cost. It seems I need to link this to the entry in the DLA so the balance goes back to £0 while an entry is recorded in the Current Account for accountancy purposes.
Yes. If you have a bank feed you’ll already have an untagged “money out” in your current account for the transaction where you took reimbursement. If you don’t have a bank feed then click the “add new transaction” button at the top of the current account page and create a “money out” transaction for the right amount on the appropriate date.
Click “tag me”, one of the options is “transfer between accounts”, click that and select the DL account as the destination for the transfer. This will create a pre-tagged “money in” transaction on the DL side which should balance out the original payment and leave the DL at zero (assuming there’s just this one purchase in there and nothing else).
I think possibly what’s confusing you is that you think there should be some sort of direct link between where the money comes out of the current account and the purchases on which it was spent - there shouldn’t. Think of yourself as a “company credit card”, and the DL account as the credit card statement you send to the company telling them how much they owe you. The purchases were paid from the DL account, the repayment is simply a transfer from one account to another at a later date.
I think possibly what’s confusing you is that you think there should be some sort of direct link between where the money comes out of the current account and the purchases on which it was spent - there shouldn’t. Think of yourself as a “company credit card”, and the DL account as the credit card statement you send to the company telling them how much they owe you. The purchases were paid from the DL account, the repayment is simply a transfer from one account to another at a later date.
Thanks for that explanation. I believe it helps clarify it for me. My only concern now though is that there isn’t one view of what the expenses were. I seem to need to go and view my CA and DLA to get the one big picture. But I guess they’re recorded in their respective ‘accounts’ regardless. Assuming my accountant understands this (I assume he would), then there should be no problem.
There are various views, for example if you go to “purchases”, then “view payments”, that will show you all your “payment to a supplier” payments in one consolidated list regardless of which bank account they were paid from. Likewise “sales” -> “view payments” gives you the list of all payments received from customers, regardless of whether they were cash, bank transfer, paypal, etc.