Episode 8: Recording Loans From Owners
I got 2 questions this past week both asking about the same issue – how to account for expenses that get paid by the owner out of his/her own pocket. It’s fairly common for a small business to not have a lot of money in the bank during the start up phase and the owner tends to pay for business expenses on their personal credit cards. You want to make sure that you get these expenses recorded on the company books and show that the company owes the money back to the owner. I go over how to record this in QuickBooks and how to record the check when the company finally pays that money back.
Hi there! I'm Mike. I am a CPA and an Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor. I teach QuickBooks locally in classrooms and do one-on-one training sessions. I created this site so I could extend my teaching to more people and offer them the best support possible.
Mike. This is perfect. Thanks so much.
You’re welcome! Please let me know if you have any other questions.
I got the following email concerning this episode:
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Hello Mike,
First of all, thank you very much for your time and effort to shoot and post the video on the website. I am absolutely new to quickbooks, and I took a accounting classes in college.
I watched your video “Episode 8: Recording Loans From Owners “, and I have couple of questions. Now, I am trying to connect my accounting knowledge with quickbooks to be able to use quickbooks for my S Corporation. I have 6-7 credit cards from different financial institutions, and I typically use these credit cards for my S Corporation’s supplies + expenses + Inventory. I see that you created “loan payable to owner” [Long term liability] account, however, entering all those credit cards transaction into “loan payable to owner” account will not show me each credit cards balance and details. I need to be able to see each credit cards balances in my company’s chart of accounts, and have a clear idea which credit card account paid exactly how much for what, and what is the balance for that credit card account. How can I have my multiple personal credit card accounts under loan payable to owner account? (can it be sub accounts under “loan payable to owner” account?)
If that is the case, I can not list those each credit cards accounts under [credit card] type of account. Should I make them Long Term Liability account under “loan payable to owner”?
My second question is: I pay those credit cards payment from my company’s checking account. What is the General Journal Entry, or if I enter the entry from bank account directly, what accounts should I increase and decrease to pay my personal credit cards payments that has been used to buy supplies + inventory for the company?
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Some good questions here! One way of dealing with this would be to make the “Loan payable to owner” account a Credit Card type and have each individual credit card as a sub-account of that. This would allow you to keep each one separately and use the credit card features of QuickBooks.
When you make a payment to one of the credit cards you would record it as a payment out of your checking account (a credit to that account) and the offset account would be the Credit Card account (in the liability section of the Balance Sheet) and that would be a debit to reduce the balance owed to the credit card company.
Hopefully this clears things up for you. Please let me know if you have any other questions. I’ll demonstrate the credit card features in QuickBooks on an upcoming podcast.