How do I handle personal transactions in a bank or credit card account?

It's very common for online sellers to have a single bank account or credit card that gets used for both business and personal transactions. The good news is that Seller Ledger makes it easy to keep those personal transactions from mixing into your business reports and taxes — while still keeping your account balances accurate.

The short answer: use the "Not for business" category

When you have a personal transaction show up in a connected bank or credit card account, you don't want to delete it or hide it — doing so would throw off your account balance. Instead, you just want to tell Seller Ledger that it isn't a business transaction.

To do that, categorize it as Not for business. This keeps the transaction in the account (so your balance stays accurate) but removes it from your Profit & Loss, tax reports, and other business calculations.

For more on the difference between "Not for business" and "Hidden," see this article.

Categorizing many personal transactions at once

If you have a lot of personal transactions in your account, you don't have to categorize them one at a time. Seller Ledger lets you select multiple transactions and categorize them all in a single step.

1. Click into your bank or credit card account from the dashboard.
2. Find the personal transactions you want to categorize. You can use the checkboxes on the left to select multiple transactions at once.
3. Once you've selected them, click the blue Categorize button that appears at the top of the list.

4. In the pop-up, choose Not for business.
5. Click Update.

All of the selected transactions will be marked as personal and removed from your business reports.

Automate future personal transactions

If you have recurring personal transactions from the same merchant — for example, your streaming service, gym membership, or personal grocery store — you can tell Seller Ledger to automatically categorize those as "Not for business" every time they show up.

When categorizing a transaction, check the box that says Apply to future, similar transactions (and optionally the box to apply it to past transactions from the same payee as well).

From that point on, any new transactions from that same merchant will automatically be marked as "Not for business" — no extra work required on your part.

A quick tip: group by merchant to speed things up

When you click the yellow "Uncategorized" button on your dashboard, Seller Ledger groups your uncategorized transactions by merchant, showing the ones with the most transactions first. This makes it very easy to knock out large batches of personal transactions (like all of your coffee shop visits or streaming subscriptions) in just a few clicks.

For more on this workflow, see Is there a way to quickly categorize many bank transactions?

What about splitting a transaction that's partly business and partly personal?

Sometimes a single transaction includes both business and personal items — for example, a trip to the office supply store where you bought shipping supplies for your business and some household items for yourself. In that case, you can split the transaction, putting the business portion into the appropriate business category and the personal portion under "Not for business."

See Can I break a transaction into multiple categories? for step-by-step instructions.

Summary

• Use Not for business for personal transactions in a connected account — it keeps your balance accurate but excludes the transaction from business reports and taxes.
• Select multiple transactions at once and categorize them in bulk to save time.
• Check Apply to future, similar transactions to automatically handle recurring personal charges going forward.
• Use Split Transaction when a single charge includes both business and personal amounts.