Hello,
I am a sole trader and relatively new to QuickFile.
I was about to pay my expenses for April and I got stuck.
Before QuickFile, I used to log individual expenses by date in a spreadsheet, and then later pay the sum of month’s expenses with one payment.
However, in QuickFile, I seem to have to record a payment for each expense and how it was made which seems like a very long way of paying the month’s expenses.
Usually you would record each purchase separately. If they’re things you have paid for from personal money and you’re then taking one payment out of your business account to reimburse yourself then you’d tag the various purchases as paid from the proprietor drawings account and the reimbursement as a transfer from current account to proprietor drawings.
Alternatively for lots of small purchases like this you could make one purchase invoice to a dummy supplier “out of pocket expenses” with lots of lines - one for each expense posted to the appropriate code - then tag the reimbursement as payment for this purchase. The disadvantage of doing it this way is that you don’t get the nice receipt hub process for attaching the original receipts, but as long as (a) every expense is tagged to the correct category and accounted for in the correct period and (b) if asked by the tax man you can easily find the original receipt for any given expense, then you can record things however is easiest for you.
Your first paragraph is more appropriate, however, I would like some help with the how to.
When I go to Sales > Purchases, all the purchases are listed.
I then sort by Receipt Date to show all the first purchases.
I can then tick all the expenses that I want to pay, and then click on ‘Update as Paid’
Then the pop-up appears as below.
From your instructions, I am assuming that I select ‘Allocate one lump payment then use this to pay down selected invoices’ as I have above, select the ‘Proprietor Drawings Account’ and payment method as ‘Bank Transfer’, and click on Save.
I haven’t clicked on Save to see if there are other steps, but can you confirm and/or clarify the above?
It sounds like you’re on the right track. When you hit save it will create one debit on your proprietor drawings account to cover all the selected purchases, which will then update as paid.
This is now very odd - I went back to do what I mentioned above and now when I select the entries and click on ‘Update as Paid’ the radio select option ‘Allocate one lump payment then use this to pay down selected invoices’ cannot be selected. See below where the radio button is lighter than those above:
I don’t recall making any changes to settings and I tried selecting only 2 entries, reloading the page, logging off and logging back in, but it remains the same.
Do you have any suggestions as to why I can’t select the option?
You can only log a bulk payment when all the purchases are for the same supplier.
What exactly are you trying to record here? Presumably if these are different purchases from different suppliers then in reality you would have paid each supplier individually at the time? In your original post you talk about “paying your expenses” - paying whom and from where?
As a sole trader there’s no legal separation between you and the business, any separation between “business” and “personal” funds is just a matter of your own record keeping. Do you have a business bank account separate from your personal account? My interpretation of your original post is you’re a sole trader, you have a business account, but you make a number of small purchases each month using your “private” funds and then “pay yourself back” at the end of the month from the business account, is that correct?
I have an expense that I pay for myself (credit card/cash/whatever).
I upload it to the receipts hub and then tag it as a purchase (e.g. code 5000 but I use custom codes between 5000 to 5999). And yes there are different suppliers e.g. utility company, coffee shop, software developer, etc.
Instead of paying these separately at the time of purchase or separately at the end of the month, I used to when using an excel sheet, pay the sum of the different expenses at the beginning of the next month when all the expenses for the previous month had been logged. I want to do the same with QuickFile. I want to select all the purchases for one month (from different suppliers as above) and pay them as a single payment to me.
I have a business account for the business and the expenses that I pay for at the time of payment are paid in different ways as above, and I simply want to make the one payment for all the expenses that I paid for as a single payment into my account, which I believe is done by selecting the Properietor Drawings Account. I have not set a personal account in QuickFile as I only use the one business bank account for the business.
Expenses paid directly by the business (e.g. directly from the business account, or funds in the business PayPal account) are a separate matter which I still have to look into because they haven’t arisen for the months I am attending to at the moment in QuickFile.
I hope that makes sense, if not please ask for clarification.
Thanks, that makes sense. So from an accounting perspective, in your step 2 when you tag the purchases from the receipt hub, you should tick “this item has been paid in full” and select the proprietor drawings account. The purchase will now show as “paid” in QuickFile, which is correct - you and the business are legally the same entity.
Your step 3 is simply a transfer between bank accounts, moving money from the “current account” to the “proprietor drawings account”, exactly the same as when you take actual drawings out of the business for your own use. If you want a quick way to work out how much you have spent like you have been doing in the excel sheet you could use the “advanced search” in the proprietor drawings bank account for the appropriate date range and a reference of “payment to”.
Your point 5 - expenses paid directly by the business - you would record the purchase records in exactly the same way, just pay them from the current account or paypal account rather than from the drawings account.
Ian,
Thank you for the reply but when I tried what you said the profit and loss figures didn’t make sense and it seems that you can’t ‘unpay’ the expenses so I deleted all the month’s expenses and purchases and have uploaded all the receipts again for the month of April which I was working on.
Where I am now is that I have all the expenses for April uploaded but what I have not done is what you described for step 2 as ticking the box “this item has been paid in full”
I would appreciate if we could take this step by step. In Purchases > Show All Purchases, can I now select all the April receipts for expenses that I paid for myself, then click ‘Update as Paid’ at the top, then in the Grouped Payment box that appears, select ‘Log payments on the date specified’, Select ‘Propertier Drawings Account’ for ‘Paid From’ and ‘Bank Transfer’ for payment method and simply keep the current date, as that is when the sum of the receipts would usually be paid, and then click on ‘Save’?
If you can confirm or clarify that step, then I can see where I am and ask for help if I get stuck.
As a sole trader you are the business, so each business-related purchase is “paid” at the point when you pay the supplier, whether that is with money that nominally belongs to the business or to you. The end of month process you’re describing has nothing to do with paying the purchases, it is simply a balance sheet movement of funds between the current account and the proprietor drawings account (which represents money you put into or take out of the business).
Assuming (for the sake of keeping the numbers simple) that you take no other drawings out of the business, suppose you make three out of pocket purchases for the business from three different suppliers over the course of the month, for (again keeping it simple) £10 each.
You would log each of those receipts in QuickFile as a purchase on the date given on the receipt, and tick “this purchase has been paid in full” from the drawings account. Or if you already have unpaid purchases that you’ve already done through the receipt hub then log payment for each of them from the drawings account on the date of the respective receipt. Thus you end up with three money out transactions on your drawings account for £10 each, and the account shows as £30 “overdrawn” at month end.
Now if you want to “reimburse yourself” for those purchases then that would be a £30 “money out” transaction on your current account which you tag as a transfer to the drawings account, which returns the drawings balance back to zero. You’re not marking anything as paid at this point as the purchases are already paid (from drawings).
