Family Child Care Business
I'm getting ready to open a family child care (in-home daycare) business in January and am looking for advice from any current YNAB users who manage their personal and business finances with YNAB. Since so much is shared between business and personal finances I'd prefer not to manage a separate system for the Daycare and duplicate my financial work if possible. Do you keep one budget and use categories for 100% business expenses? Or do you keep a separate budget and use your personal budget reports to calculate T/S% deductions on shared expenses?
I'm grateful for any tips.
-
Hi Slate Gray Boa !
Personally, I'm a huge fan of separate budgets, especially for business purposes. Businesses need their own accounts, lest you run the risk of mixing your personal and business finances (leaving your personal finances vulnerable to business expenses), and having those separate accounts makes separate budgets easier to manage.
This will help keep your business and personal money from getting assigned to the wrong categories, and is especially helpful when it comes time to file your taxes!
Our founder, Jesse, has written a number of blog posts about managing small businesses in YNAB. I'll leave them below:
- Goodbye Quickbooks: You Need a Separate Business Budget
- Moving YNAB to YNAB
- YNAB’s Business Category Setup in YNAB Revealed.
- Goodbye Quickbooks: Use YNAB to Track Accounts Receivable
- Success Story: How YNAB Helped Me Launch A Profitable Business
Please keep in mind that they were created based off of our previous version of YNAB (YNAB 4), so you won't recognize some of the screenshots. The information is all still relevant, though!
Jesse also chats more about the process in this podcast about YNAB for Your Business.
Check those out, and let us know if you have more questions!
