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How to account for personally paid expenses (out of pocket expenses) and how to reimburse as a limited company

How to add personally paid expenses and how to then adjust for this in your money owed to director account.

Steven Anderson avatar
Written by Steven Anderson
Updated over a week ago

This a quick article to explain how personally paid expenses work in Ember.

You can add personally paid expenses into Ember using the Expenses function. Simply navigate to the expenses tab to do this and click on "Add out-of-pocket expense"

In the example below, an expense has been incurred accidentally during a meeting with a client. This was paid on a personal card instead of the company card.

You can add multiple line items if you have multiple expenses to claim. Take the example above, instead of adding multiple separate expenses, I can add all the expenses incurred during the trip into one entry by clicking on + Add extra line item, selecting the appropriate category, and then adding in the item description and cost before saving the changes. I can also change the expense description from Coffee to Trip to client to cover the various expenditure.

The multiple expenses will then appear on the Trip to client expense.

In the screenshot above, you can see the original £5 coffee expense expense is still there, but I've now added a couple of extra line items as an example. In this case, the cost of travel to get to the meeting with the client (£20) and the cost of picking up some snacks on the way back (£7.99). All transactions fall under the Travel & subsistence category in this example.

Any expense added under the "Expenses" tab will credit your directors loan account with the total amount you have incurred personally. You can see this on your Dashboard in the My current tax year finances section under Business Owes, and you will see an amount showing as "Directors loan".

You can then reimburse yourself these funds tax free when the business is in a viable position to do so. You should consider the cash flow implications of any withdrawal and the company's ability to meet future obligations.

If you decide to reimburse yourself, you should transfer the funds from your business account to your personal account and then categorise this withdrawal as "Directors loan" so that the transfer nets off against any outstanding balance.

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