Managing Your Business using Mint.com

[Stephen]

Do you manage your business using Mint.com? If so, we invite you to start customizing your Mint experience today. And as you discover what works best for you we encourage you to share your creative ideas with other Mint users who may have similar money management interests and approaches. Please post on this thread for all things related to creative use of custom categories and tags with managing your business on Mint!

[Flower_Girl]

I was just talking to my husband about this. My issues would be how to set up a payroll system (so you know how much you are paying who, etc.) and figuring out taxes. But I guess that would be figured out in traditional accounting practices, but it would be nice to be about to get all the information at a glance when you are on the road on a laptop or something. Just a thought.

[jjudge]

I just setup an account tonight for my business. I think this will be very useful for my business partner and I to keep tabs on cash flows. I'd love to be able to customize the categories and gear them towards business.

Also, I think you should consider offering a service tailored towards businesses. I'd be willing to pay a small monthly fee (say $10 or so) for current functionality with customizable categories, etc. Food for thought...

[mburdsall]

i would also think that you would need to addsome addtional feature or strengthen some thatyou have already.

income trens tab is needed so that you can see how money is coming in compared to a forecast.

stronger A/R visbility. Which customers are paying on time or whch need to be dunned.

Where is the money going internally to be spend and where is money being spent that was not budgeted.

payroll integration would be nice.

Invoicing

Product/service profit and lose

[spikegomez]

I look like they are such a book keeping system???

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[bghouse]

I've just started using Mint for business, as I'm a sole proprietor and my accounts have both business and personal transactions. All the other programs I've tried made this so cumbersome, so the TAGs are fantastic for organizing.

It would be awesome if the TAGS could be part of the rules, not just the categories. This would make it easy to separate the two faster, instead of tagging by hand.

I run some internet businesses, so I'm using Tags for the business names (cool) without having to setup multiple accounts in a chart of accounts (goodbye Quickbooks).

I am adding some new categories to make this work, specifically to line up with Schedule C for Tax Time next year. The spreadsheet export looks like this will be easy for a small business owner.

[mburdsall]

I've just started using Mint for business, as I'm a sole proprietor and my accounts have both business and personal transactions. All the other programs I've tried made this so cumbersome, so the TAGs are fantastic for organizing.

It would be awesome if the TAGS could be part of the rules, not just the categories. This would make it easy to separate the two faster, instead of tagging by hand.

I run some internet businesses, so I'm using Tags for the business names (cool) without having to setup multiple accounts in a chart of accounts (goodbye Quickbooks).

I am adding some new categories to make this work, specifically to line up with Schedule C for Tax Time next year. The spreadsheet export looks like this will be easy for a small business owner.

I have a question for you. how are you doing P/L and balance sheet reporting as a small business with Mint? I've found it very difficult to deal with the income side of the business. budgeting does not include income. There is no trend or reporting on budgeting only expenses. I would be interested in understanding how you use Mint to support your business. Also I would be interested in how you use Mint to do your taxes, other then to collect transactions and download them into excel for import intoother applicaitons.

[mikeasmel]

I have an AMEX account with 2 cards; one for personal and one for business. I am trying to figure out how to keep the cards on the same login for mint, but be able to split the costs in Mint so that I can run costs for my schedule C directly from Mint.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

[mburdsall]

The only suggestion I would have is to use Tags on the transactions. Today Tags can be created and applied on each transaction or group of transaction. If you go to the transaction tab and select the business card only those transaction will appear. Then click the button at the top to select all transactions. Use the edit multiple button to edit multiple transactions and hit the edit details. You will see the tabs that you have defined. click the tab that you desire and all transaction will be group in the tag. You can then do your reporting on that tab.

I've put a request into Mint to be able to assign tag more easily to accounts.

I've also ask Mint to enable all reports and graphs to use the tags. Today the budget, networth, cashflow and Spendspace do not allow you to use tags.

[nkw]

I've been using MINT for my business for about 6 months. I love the ease of use and the fact that I have a real time snapshot of where I stand.
What I miss is reports. At a minimum I would love to have P&L and balance sheet reports. I can download transactions and do some magic but having them in the app would be great.
Other things that were mentioned in other posts:
- Payroll: definitely a nice to have but I can do it in Bank of America for free now or in Surepayroll.com for money but would prefer to use MINT.
- Invoicing: also a nice to have but can get by with Feshbooks.com or just manually generating invoices.

[kmillard]

I have a small business, rental properties, and personal accts inside of mint, for the most part the transactions are separated by accts but sometimes they get intertwined

I wish i could choose a tier or tags that separate these accts so that my budgets and research would not be skewed, almost like a separate identity that would have specific accts under it

Also I would love to see a more userfriendly way to connect my transactions with neat receipts, while i don't use the program now, it does seem to be nice

Right now I have another program which I use for invoicing and breaking out where money comes from, that is why mint is so good for expense

My only regret is that I purchased quickbooks and took a class in it earlier this month, what a waste!

[kmillard]

ok i think i can do what i want with tags
but
i wish i could set account tags or a way to tell mint that everytime a transaction comes into a specific acct then tag it as.....

that way i can see seperate accts in trends or personal/bus/rental accts

[kmillard]

trends seems to have a lull when viewing a specific tag
i may just need to wait for the server to update
but i took about 100 transactions and gave them 1 tag
then i went to trends and filtered by only that tag
now i do not see all of the categories within that tag on trends

[kmillard]

sorry i am learning as i go
what i need or want is to set a rule for a merchant, so that everytime mint sees it in a specific acct, it will automatically give it specific tags

[mburdsall]

Does it have to be in a specific account? by making a rule in the edit details section of the trasnaction you can have the merchant set automcatically based on the description imported.

[yourmanstan]

Please post on this thread for all things related to creative use of custom categories and tags with managing your business on Mint!

It would be REALLY great if mint automatically marked items as potential tax deductions.

also, i think the categories need to be completely different for business...

[mburdsall]

If when we setup that category we can classify the category as tax related or not. This way we could get regular reporting on tax transactions

[mintfeedback]

i have 2 businesses and have created so many categories that i literally can't create any more because my monitor isn't big enough to scroll down them all! (i can on my desktop, not on laptop)

when i try to use arrows, it jumps to next transaction rather than going down categories.

other than delete categories (which i won't do because i use mint for ease of tax purposes, any ideas?

[mintfeedback]

ok, not quite church and state, but business and home.

has anyone figured out a way to create rules based on not only the vendor name but the method of payment?

for example, we all use the post office. i'd like to rename all of usps as "post office" but i want different categories. when i pay for postage out of my business account, i'd like it to be a business expense, and the same for home use - i'd like it to go into the home category and avoid manually changing categories for each and every transaction.

any ideas?

[mikeasmel]

the only problem with using tags and having to separate my credit cards, one for personal and one for business, is that I won't be able to get the maximum rewards from my credit card by having to have my personal and my business on separate cards. I hope that Mint builds some reporting capabilities soooooon!

[tee2nu]

What would make Mint.com the best financial tracking service would be if it could have a separate section for business accounts. I tried doing the category changes but it does not work as I need.

If there was a section on the left side of the website that had a tab labeled business with sub categories for your business so you can put separate business accounts under those tabs(credit cards, bank accounts, etc.). Now every transactions under those tabs would be labeled as business. Now personal and business accounts would be separated logically.

Then to add icing on the cake, a P&L webpage!

[ben@refactr.com]

Without the ability to delete/change the default categories or create new "top-level" categories, Mint won't be useful to many businesses. What really needs to happen is there to be a branch split off to accommodate businesses.

If it were good enough it could justify a $10-$20 / month subscription.

[bookmarkmaster]

Do you manage your business using Mint.com? If so, we invite you to start customizing your Mint experience today. And as you discover what works best for you we encourage you to share your creative ideas with other Mint users who may have similar money management interests and approaches. Please post on this thread for all things related to creative use of custom categories and tags with managing your business on Mint!

[jeremyjjw]

i use mint for my personal finances and LOVE the intelligent architecture and design of the product. my company employs about 20 people and it would be impossible to keep track of everything with Mint (unless they release a business line - hint, HINT!) and I am currently using quickbooks but i would really like to switch to something online and something with a more intuitive design (like mint). Does anyone have any recommendations??