Using PocketSmith for a Business

PocketSmith is not designed for business use. However, some users use it to track their small businesses or side hustles, such as Airbnb, investment properties, family trusts, etc., often alongside their personal finances. This guide shows how this can be done best.

PocketSmith does not have accounting-specific business features. If you need these features for your business finances, we'd recommend using business accounting software, such as Xero.

Business accounts from the same bank

If you use the same bank but different online banking login details to access your business accounts, you can follow these instructions here to add these in: Adding another set of credentials to an existing feed.

Creating distinct budgets

To create distinct budgets for your personal and business-related earnings and spending, consider using parent/sub-categories. You can find more about how these work in this guide: Sub-categories and nesting.

With this, you could arrange your categories to reflect the purpose they relate to and have separate budgets for each sub-category. For example:

To set up your categories in a similar way:

Head to the Categories (Manage > Categories) page
Create any new categories you need: Adding new categories
Restructure the categories as needed: Change the category order

Tracking an investment property

Another example where the above information might be helpful is if you are interested in using your PocketSmith account to track both your regular personal earnings and spending, as well as an investment property.

All of the same steps and tips above still apply, but instead, your categories might look more like:

Viewing business and personal accounts separately

A number of areas of PocketSmith, such as the Budget page, will show you your combined earning and spending for all of your accounts and categories.

We have some tips below to help keep your personal and business finances separate!

Using the Dashboard

You could set up two 'Dashboards' - one showing personal and one for business. You can find more on this feature here: Using your customizable Dashboard.

You can customise and configure the widgets shown on each Dashboard to reflect only your Business or Personal accounts and categories.

You can find more on the different ways to customise your widgets here: Configuring individual widget settings. A great one worth checking out is the: Earning & spending widget.

Using Saved Income & Expense reports

You can also use our Income & Expense report to analyse specific accounts or categories (for example, Business accounts only), then save the selection as a saved report that can be revisited with a click! 🙌

You can find out more on customising the Income & Expense report and saving the selection in the following guides: