Everyone starts out small, whether selling from the boot of your car before you open your first store, or living the start-up life with nothing more than your computer and an internet connection. But at some point, you need to focus on how to grow your business, and you might do this by separating your personal and business finances.

This may seem a small, symbolic gesture but it says: ‘I’m serious about this.’ You may not yet need to open a separate business bank account, although that's recommended, but you should account for personal and business finances separately.

This not only simplifies your life, but it also gives you an accurate picture of how your business is doing. Best of all, this can be automated with MoneyTracker from Nedbank.

What is MoneyTracker?

MoneyTracker is a free online tool that you can use as a Nedbank client to manage your money in smarter ways. It’s effectively an intuitive budgeting tool that you can access via Online Banking or the Money app to manage your money in ways that make sense to you.

You do this by creating a budget that lists your income and expenses, including limits on how much you want to spend in the month. Your bank account transactions are then automatically imported into MoneyTracker, so that you can see how much you’ve actually spent on each of the expenses.

The beauty of MoneyTracker is that allocating expenses to items on your budget can be automated. The app learns which expenses need to be allocated to budget items. For example, it will learn that purchases from a particular shop are for groceries and from your favourite restaurant is for entertainment, and so on.

Easily separate your finances

One of the handiest features is the ability to separate your personal finances from your business finances. You do this by creating different dashboard views on MoneyTracker to monitor related income and expenses – you can create up to 8. For instance, you’d create one for your personal budget, and another for your business or side hustle, or hobbies and savings goals like a holiday or education fund.

Each dashboard includes a budget, to which you can allocate expenses so that anything you buy from a supplier for your side hustle is recognised as a business expense, within your business dashboard. Armed with clearer insights into how your business is doing, you can then make informed decisions about how and when to adjust spending patterns.

Perfect small business tool

Although you can use MoneyTracker to manage your personal budget, its additional power lies in helping you to manage your small business better. It does this by allowing you to run basic budgets, as well as produce and send invoices and generate easy-to-understand reports. While not a fully functional accounting suite, these basic functions help you to run a tighter ship, while teaching you business management skills.

The ability to see trends or warning signs is essential to managing your business, and with MoneyTracker that job becomes a whole lot easier.