Are you stealing from yourself?

Never ever blend your private money with your company’s money.

There’s cash in the till so it’s easy to just pick some out on your way to the shop or cinema. You get a Lazada delivery for those shoes you ordered and pay using your company’s account. Or maybe your wallet is empty, and you can’t be bothered to go to the ATM, so you put some cash from the till into it. You go to the Cash & Carry for the business and add stuff for your home to the shopping basket. It’s your money in the end so that makes it all ok.

Wrong – it is NOT ok at all, you are effectively stealing from your company. You wouldn’t let your staff do that so why should you be doing it? “I’ll just deduct it from my earnings end of the month,” you tell yourself. But that never happens, you forget how much you actually took, lots of little slips with numbers on in the till which you don’t repay. So, you end up with lost cash reserves for your business.

The other side of this is taking things from your company to save on private purchases. If you have a pub you might be stocking your home bar with drinks from the pub. If you have a restaurant then you might be bringing food home from the kitchen. These are items you can sell to your customers – so by taking them you are stopping yourself from earning on these items. You should be paying for these items out of your own pocket, not the companys’.

Let’s say you wanted to buy a new iPad for your son’s birthday and used cash from the business to do so. You plan to pay it back via your salary end of the month. Suddenly you have an unexpected expense, or your sales numbers drop dramatically for the month. This means you won’t have the cash to pay all your staff salaries or the electricity bill at the end of the month. That iPad purchase has now impacted your company’s ability to operate.

Your business account should never fund your private purchases – the impact on your ability to run the business are dramatic and you could lose it completely.

Want to know more – get in touch to hear how I can help you plan your company cash so you are not impacting your ability to operate.