5 Reasons to separate business banking from your personal banking

A key conundrum that many sole traders face when building their own enterprise is simply deciding whether or not they should set up a business transaction account for their company. On one hand, your company may still be in its early stages, so securing dedicated business bank accounts may feel premature. On the other hand, however, you may already find yourself having to differentiate between your business expenses and your personal expenses for tax purposes. And if there are just way too many receipt trails to keep track of, then it certainly can help to have a dedicated account for these transactions rather than wasting time sifting through all your purchases manually.

If your mind still isn’t made up, however, and you need a little more research to help get you to where you need to go, then consider the following points outlined below.

Here are 5 compelling reasons to separate your business banking from your personal bank accounts:

1. To maintain a clearer understanding of your company finances
As we mentioned, creating a separate transaction account for your business can help you determine exactly how much you’re spending in relation to what your company’s pulling in. This can be highly valuable for business owners who are still in the process of determining the financial viability of their business, as you can remove all doubt or ambiguity surrounding the fiscal health of your enterprise.

Granted, you may still be able to monitor how much your business is bringing in by checking the statements or transaction history of your personal account. But as any seasoned business owner knows, establishing your business is less about monitoring your earnings and more about monitoring your expenses and liabilities. In this regard, being able to determine whether it’s your personal spending or your business spending that’s eating into your coffers can help you determine whether your company is in need of financial reform or restructuring earlier rather than later.

We recommend starting off this process of cleaning up your company’s finances by first securing a business bank account that fits the needs of your organisation. Do a little research online in order to compare the best business bank accounts available to you. And remember that you can only benefit from being as thorough as possible here.

2. To simplify your company’s tax returns
Many sole traders will likely never forget their first tax time as a business owner. After all, it’s hard enough managing tax time as an employed professional – having to take on the extra challenges that come with being self-employed for the first time can be memorable, to say the very least.

For starters, sole traders registered in Australia don’t actually have to submit a business tax return, which may be contrary to popular belief. Instead, they submit an individual tax return that includes all their business income and expenses in a separate business section. Sole traders are also required to register for GST (or goods and services tax).

Filling your tax return as a sole trader grows even more complicated if you actually do hire workers at any point during the given financial year. In the event that you do hire workers and are thus required to record any PAYG withholding and super contributions, then these must also be recorded in business activity statements (BAS) that are also submitted with the ATO as supporting documentation for your tax return.

Thankfully, if all your business transactions (including your worker salaries) are processed through a dedicated business account, you can simplify the process of submitting your business tax return in a major way. And of course, the same goes for businesses that are registered private companies rather than sole proprietorships.

3. To streamline your accounting workflows
If you’ve ever been subjected to an ATO audit, then you know just how crucial it is to maintain clear and concise accounting processes for your business. Unfortunately, there’s just far too much room for errors (like accidentally claiming personal expenses as business expenses) if you use your personal bank accounts to handle business expenses and earnings as well.

In this sense, keeping separate personal and business bank accounts can also help you reduce the costs of outsourcing your business accounting to financial service providers. Or if you are using an in-house accounting specialist, you better believe that maintaining separate accounts can help drastically reduce their workload, as you’ll be cutting so much unnecessary administration work from their daily responsibilities.

And remember that it’s good to establish strong accounting workflows while your enterprise is still young. It goes without saying that the financial management of your business will only grow more complicated as your company grows larger and more complex in its structure and ratio of assets and liabilities. So it’s a good idea to try and formalise strong accounting processes now while you still have the space and energy to experiment with different systems in order to find the workflow that best fits your enterprise and accounting team.

4. To strengthen the credibility of your business
Think about it – when you set up a website or social media profiles for your business, these are likely to be under your company’s name rather than yours, right? So why wouldn’t your business bank accounts be any different here?

One of the foremost reasons to open up a business bank account is simply so your company’s banking can be conducted under your company’s own name rather than under your personal name. This means that when you write invoices and need to list your bank account name and number, you can have this financial information be presented as a fixture of your business rather than bearing your name.

Naturally, this can help you establish your business better as its own entity rather than as a corporate appendage that hangs off of you. This more solid presence of your business as its own entity can help strengthen the credibility of your organisation to any prospective new clients and customers. And why wouldn’t you want to make the strongest first impression possible when acquiring new business?

5. To improve your digital security
Finally, with digital security threats like ransomware and malware on the rise, now is the perfect time for business owners to be investing in their company’s digital security. This means securing internet security packages, practising multi-factor authentication and other security measures, and making sure you bring no strange USBs in off the street.

But improving your company’s cybersecurity is about so much more than evaluating your computer practices. It’s also about conducting a risk analysis in order to determine where your company may be vulnerable to attack. And it may not be all that surprising to hear that maintaining one account for both personal and business expenses can leave your enterprise vulnerable to all kinds of cybercrimes, including fraud and monetary theft.

If for any reason, your personal banking information falls into the hands of a hacker or other malicious third party, then you may find that your company spending also grinds to a halt, which can negatively impact your business both in terms of its operations as well as its reputation. For this reason, maintaining a business bank account with strict guidelines for employee use can help safeguard your company’s finances.

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As you can see, there are plenty of advantages to opening up a bank account that’s solely for your business, even if your company is in its earliest stages. With that, all that’s left to do is find a banking solution or service provider that offers a business transaction account with features that suit your business. So go out there and do some shopping in order to find the perfect banking solution to suit your business and staff today.

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