Ltd company - personal purchases logging?

[adnw]

LTD Company account:

How to account for purchases from personal cards etc?

I have a ltd company bank account.

Some purchases are made with a debit card for this account and all direct debits are setup here.

I also have quite a few other personal cards, and relatives personal cards that are used to make purchases for the business.

How would I account for this?

Do i add in a Cash account for cash purchases made from my own personal cash?

Do i add in a credit card account for each and every single purchase card and log each one to its own specific card,?

or do i just create one generic personal credit card and just log them to that?

or do i just put them all to the directors loan account?

or something else?

once logged in one of the above, what procedure would i use to take that money or ‘pay’ that money?

here is a list of purchase methods which would fall under personal cards etc:

my personal bank.

wifes personal bank.

joint personal bank.

amex card.

other credit card.

ebay/paypal account of a relative linked to their card.

ebay/paypal account of mine.

cash / card purchases from others - contractors, friends, other various.

do i just group these as one generic thing, or make an account for each?

[JohnJ]

You should be recording from whom you bought something, so it corresponds with the receipt that you file, but you can then pay from the company bank account to the person who made the purchase. So if your wife buys a box of paper from Office World with her own money in some form, reimburse her by bank transfer but tag that to a receipt against Office World. This has the advantage that you can have a default nominal for Office World to save time entering receipts, and you can look back to see how much you spend with them each year.

It becomes more complicated if you reimburse several purchases in a single payment. In that case you might want to create one or more loan accounts to pay the receipts from and then clear the balance with a transfer from the bank account when you reimburse them.

But if the purchases are relatively trivial and unlikely to warrant analysing, then create a supplier of “Fred Smith - miscellaneous expenses” and put them all through that, then you can reimburse as you please.

Those are what I do but I’m sure others will have equally valid suggestions. It comes down to what’s most convenient for your way of working.

[adnw]

@JohnJ

You should be recording from whom you bought something, so it corresponds with the receipt that you file, but you can then pay from the company bank account to the person who made the purchase. So if your wife buys a box of paper from Office World with her own money in some form, reimburse her by bank transfer but tag that to a receipt against Office World. This has the advantage that you can have a default nominal for Office World to save time entering receipts, and you can look back to see how much you spend with them each year.

Yes it would be from places like Office World and would be mostly from regular Suppliers.

So in this example, if my wife buys an item from Office World,
Do i tag the receipt to an invoice i create to supplier Office World.
Then what would i do?
Do i make a bank transfer to my wife, and tag that as paying for the Office World Receipt?

@JohnJ

It becomes more complicated if you reimburse several purchases in a single payment. In that case you might want to create one or more loan accounts to pay the receipts from and then clear the balance with a transfer from the bank account when you reimburse them.

This is probably how i would do it.
Add up lots of purchases from various suppliers, then make one large transfer from company bank account to my wife/me.

If i added up lots of purchases from various suppliers by different people, could i group all this together and just make one payment to my own persona bank account to cover these and tag that as paying them? (i would obviously personally split up this money and give to where ever its due)

If its not actually taken out of the company bank account, would you tag do a payment/transfer/tag to the directors loan account - effectively showing it owes me money due to me spending on my personal account?

@JohnJ

But if the purchases are relatively trivial and unlikely to warrant analysing, then create a supplier of “Fred Smith - miscellaneous expenses” and put them all through that, then you can reimburse as you please.

Would this mainly be used for some generic expenses that you dont especially want to log to a supplier? just general bits which can be marked as general sale items and group them all together?

Would that be all receipts added up into one invoice to Fred Smith, or each individual receipt logged to Fred Smith, and the paid as one large payment?

thanks

[ian_roberts]

@adnw

This is probably how i would do it.
Add up lots of purchases from various suppliers, then make one large transfer from company bank account to my wife/me.

If i added up lots of purchases from various suppliers by different people, could i group all this together and just make one payment to my own persona bank account to cover these and tag that as paying them? (i would obviously personally split up this money and give to where ever its due)

If its not actually taken out of the company bank account, would you tag do a payment/transfer/tag to the directors loan account - effectively showing it owes me money due to me spending on my personal account?

In that case you could just do all the individual purchases as being paid from the director’s loan account (since that’s effectively what you’re doing - lending the company money that it immediately uses to buy things), and then if/when the company pays you back then that is a transfer from the current account to the director’s loan.

[adnw]

Here is another example of what does happen, so whats the best way to account for his:

Example 1:
I make purchases from SCREWFIX and B&Q.
Some are made with my own cash, some with my own Card1, some with my own Card2.

If i log each receipt as a purchase to each supplier SCREWFIX and B&Q and leave them as unpaid in my account because they have already been paid by my persona cards.

If i let these build up for a month or so and they add upto around £1000.
At this point they would still show as unpaid (i think).
Then i decide to take out £500 out of the company account from the cash machine, can i attribute that £500 towards paying the £1000 owed to me (these receipts)?

If I then wait a week and take £1000 out of the bank, can i attribute £500 of that to pay the unpaid receipts above and keep £500 either in credit to me, or
transfer it over to the directors loan account or something?

Or in this example would you just have all the receipts being paid by the directors loan account, then pay back into the directors loan account however i like with random multiple payments - like cash withdrawals, bank transfers etc?

---

Example 2:

My PA (not an employee) pays a lot of my invoices with her own card and then I pay her back from either my personal account or the company account.

They pay for invoices, buy items for me online, buy items on ebay etc for me.

I then pay them back every few weeks either from the company account, or my personal account and reimburse myself later.

Should I

a) create invoices for each of these receipts linked to each supplier and log them as PAID to a bank account called PA,
Then if i pay PA from my personal bank do a transfer from the Directors Loan account to PA (because ive paid it and the company owes me),

or

b) log all the receipts as paid by the directors loan account and then pay the person back however i want from my own personal money?

or

c) log all the receipts as paid by the directors loan account account, and then if i pay my PA from the company account, log that payment towards paying some of the directors loan account off?

[JohnJ]

Example 1 will give problems in allocating the payment, as you can’t allocate a single bank entry to more than one supplier. That’s where an intermediate ‘loan’ account comes in as it allows the invoices to be marked as paid, and then when you pay out from the bank that’s shown as a transfer to the loan account to clear that balance.

I’m sure I’m not the only person thinking this sounds unnecessarily complicated and potentially error-prone. Could you not get a company debit card (or credit card if your bank offers them free - I’m not a big fan of giving money to banks) or a separate personal card that you can treat as a company card, pay off from the company current account and import the statement to simplify reconciliation? Maybe get an additional bank account with one of the challenger banks like Starling or Tide? Then hopefully the remaining transactions would be few and simple enough to reimburse individually from the company account or even lump into one miscellaneous invoice.

[adnw]

hi
yes i probably will going forward, but when other people make purchases on my behalf from their own cards it just wanted to know the easiest way of accounting for it.

i guess just make them as paid from the directors loan account and then pay them off whenever personally

[JohnJ]

Or if you can, pay them individually by online transfer, though watch out if you pay bank charges, this is where banks like Starling win. It’s much easier to reconcile if payments are one-to-one with receipts or at least supplier accounts. Consider how you’d go about checking if someone suggests you haven’t reimbursed them for a particular payment. And if you’re VAT registered and get an inspection they’ll probably do some random checks of bank statement entries back to their record in the accounts and having additional complexity can lead to them asking more detailed questions.