Quite new to accounting and as such self teaching myself based on the tutorials and guides on the website - great guides by the way.
My question is 2 parts:
Once I have purchased something from my personal account for the good of the business - do I create a capital account and place the amount spend here under received amount - Funds contributed- and create an expense claim for it? or do I just create an expense claim for it as it came from my personal account?
Once I have created the expense claim, how do I show the business has paid/reimbursed me for this amount?
Any help someone could offer would be greatly appreciated.
Are you a sole trader or a company?
For a sole trader you would only put it to Equity (capital) if you don’t intend reimbursing your self
For a company you wouldn’t go anywhere near the capital accounts.
Creating the expense claim would enable the business to take up the purchase.
To pay an expense claim by cheque - Bank Account Spend Money
Depending on the reason for your using your personal funds and the frequency of these purchases you could consider a business debit/credit card, or for small value amounts a petty cash float. Then the need for expense claims is some what reduced
Let’s presume you have created a proper chart of accounts with either capital accounts or owner’s equity, depending on your form of organization.
Create the expense claim to record the purchase, allocating the transaction to the applicable expense account. This creates a liability in the account called Expense claims, showing that the business owes you money for making a purchase on its behalf. Next, the liability should be cleared. If you want to actually reimburse yourself, use Spend Money and allocate to Expense claims. This is also what you would do if an employee made the purchase with his/her own funds. If you are an owner/partner/shareholder, however, it would be more usual to use a journal entry to clear the liability. Debit Expense claims and credit your Capital account or Owner's equity. For convenience, you can clear expense claims periodically, say once per month. No need to clear each one individually. For employees you would probably clear claims every pay day.
If you are a sole trader or a partnership and the funds are to be left in the business (rather then being reimbursed) then do exactly as @Tut’s has outlined. However, if you have a corporation with issued share capital and you want to have future access to those funds, then the transfer should be made to a Shareholders Loan account under Liabilities.
The capital account of a issued shares corporation should equal the value of the issued shares. So if you have 100 shares issued at $1 each - then the capital account should equal $100. To transfer additional funds to the capital account implies that additional shares are going to be issued (purchased) as you are providing permanent funding. Once this has occurred the only way to gain access to those funds is to either sell the shares to another party or share buy back. Both of these would require the company to be formally valued and the share buy back may or may not require an application to the courts depending on your jurisdiction and company constitution.
In addition you will to update the company’s share registry