You Need A Separate Business Budget

You Need a Separate Business Budget (YNASBB—nope, that doesn’t work. Let’s let it die here.)

YNAB will serve your small business well. It has mine. It gave me what I call, “pile-of-money clarity.” Several years ago, YNAB was profitable with a very small team, and I couldn’t have been happier. Then I moved YNAB from Quickbooks to YNAB. That move was a game-changer for me. I suddenly had clarity surrounding the business checking account balance. I no longer had to wonder if we could hire, because I could see that our category for payroll was doing just fine. I saw I could be more aggressive with advertising, because I saw that we had advertising dollars where they were supposed to be.

We went from a company with seven part/full-time team members, to a company with 27 over a two-year period.

All because I used YNAB, where it settled my stomach, and helped me conquer the natural risk aversion I had to hiring people, and growing the business.

Yes, I believe YNAB (the software) will serve your small business very well. It will help the risk-avoider take calculated, comfortable risks. It will help the risk-taker pull back a little bit, and be more calculated in his or her risks as well.

How to Use YNAB for Your Business Budget

In order to do this right though, you need to set up a separate business budget. Unless you have the teeniest of tiny little side operations (where a separate master category for the entire business suffices), you need to set up a separate business budget.

Go to File -> Create a New Budget… and get started.

Keep your business budget separate. It will make everything easier (taxes, reconciliation, personal vs. business expenses, etc.)

 Wait a Minute, YNAB Won’t…

YNAB won’t send your invoices for you (though you can actually track them pretty well in YNAB). YNAB won’t track your time for you. YNAB won’t track your mileage for you. YNAB won’t handle your asset depreciation. It won’t print checks. It won’t integrate with your accountant’s tax software. YNAB won’t run your payroll for you. YNAB won’t track your inventory for you (it could, and maybe I’ll write about that later).

Well sheesh Jesse, what will YNAB do?

It will add value to your business by giving you the insights you need to clarify your priorities, cut wasteful spending, boost spending where profitable, and maybe even show you that you can take a steady salary. It will give you peace of mind, as it relates to your business’ cash flow. Besides finding great people to hire these past several years, the best business decision I made was to move YNAB to YNAB.

A P.S. Regarding YNAB’s “Won’ts”

YNAB, strange as it sounds, is a multi-million dollar company now. Here’s how a multi-million dollar company handles all of the things that YNAB won’t do. (Hint: an end-all-be-all software package can, many times, be harder to use than approaching your software needs a la carte.)

Bookkeeping.

We do our books with YNAB. As a result, YNAB has a healthy buffer, keeps spending in check, and the entire team gets to spend a week in Costa Rica this year (Rule Two applied over an 18-month period!)

Invoicing.

We don’t send many invoices, but when we do, we use Freshbooks.

Time-tracking.

YNAB has just started tracking time on a new project, and we’re using Harvest (Adam, our CPO, likes them.)

Mileage tracking.

I track mileage for the four months after taxes are due, and then give up. When I do track mileage, I use an app on my iPhone. Come tax time, had I faithfully recorded the year’s mileage, I would send my tax accountant the mileage report.

Depreciation.

YNAB has a few assets that require depreciation. Our tax accountant tracks that for us each year. (Any accountant worth their salt will do that. As most of you probably know at this point, Casey Murdock handles YNAB’s taxes, and a bunch of the team’s personal taxes as well.)

Check-writing.

We have a book of (free) checks, and when we need to write one, Chance (our COO) grabs a pen from his desk and fills out the check. I sign it, then enter the check in YNAB. If we need to send a lot of checks at once, we use the free business bill pay service of our bank.

Tax filing.

YNAB doesn’t integrate with our tax accountant’s tax software, so do you know what we make him do? We send him a spreadsheet of all of our inflows/outflows of the year, and we make him do “accountant-y things” and build a pivot table to aggregate category spending and manually enter the numbers into his software. It takes him a few minutes, and he checks for accuracy along the way, instead of checking the accuracy of an import after the fact. (I re-read this and admit that I sound quite snarky here. It’s a pet peeve of mine, letting your accountant’s two hours of work for your taxes dictate your entire year’s financial workflow.)

Payroll.

We run our payroll through Paychex. I pull up the monthly payroll report and enter the outflows into YNAB. It takes me a few minutes. I like hand-entering all of our team’s pay, because it makes me happy they’re on the team.

Inventory.

We don’t have any inventory to track, but if we did, I’d buy a separate piece of software to track inventory (if it was a lot), or I’d use YNAB to do it (if it was just a small bit of inventory tracking). Cash outlays for inventory would be entered in YNAB, obviously, because YNAB handles your cash.

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