Welcome to the guide on categorizing your private practice transactions in YNAB.

Before getting started, there are a few things you need to do. Firstly if you don’t have a separate personal and professional bank account, don’t go any further. I explain in detail why it’s important to have separate bank accounts for your business and personal finances in my YNAB in Private Practice guide. Secondly, list your monthly and non-monthly expenses, this will help with your

Making Catagory Groups and Catagories in YNAB

The first thing before you can even think about categorizing your transaction for your business is to make sure you have the category groups and categories set up in your budget. Your first step is to go to the top center of your budget. Directly underneath the Month is the “category group button”. Create a name for that group. I Recommend having a category group for Payroll, Monthly Expenses, and Non-Monthly Expenses. Inside these category groups, list all of your expenses in the appropriate category group. You do this by clicking on the plus sign next to the category group name. If you want to learn more about how to customize the categories with goals, check out YNAB’s guide for categories

Categorizing Transactions in your Private Practice Accounts Accounts

To make sure that the transactions go into the right category, it’s important to check your transactions regularly. I recommend once a week at the minimum. You can totally check more if you want, but don’t make yourself anxious over the money.

Click on the bank account on the left sidebar. It’s the icon directly under the bar graph icon. This will bring you to your bank account or credit card. Go to the bar under your balances and click “file import” to update your transactions if you have your account connected. Otherwise, click on “add transactions. From there, work left to right to make sure all of the details are correct. You want to make sure the account, date, and payee are all correct before picking a category.

From there, you click on the category section and it will give you a drop-down. This should have all of the categories you just made of monthly and non-monthly expenses. Click the correct category you’d like to assign the transaction to the category you want. Continue left to right to make sure the right amount of money is flowing in and out. Click Save to finish, or “save and add another” to do another transaction.

Return to your budget to make sure you don’t need to cover any overspending. Congratulations! You used just categorized some transactions. Though this is only the basics in categorizing private practice transactions in YNAB, I have some additional tips though!

Tips for Transactions in your Private Practice YNAB

• For any of your income, list your “Payee” as your practice name. So if your practice name is Propagate Hope Counseling, every time your credit card processor deposits money make the Payee “Propagate Hope Counseling”. This makes things look neat and gives you a boost in confidence that your practice is making you money. This becomes helpful if you end up with a side hustle and do a “Does Business As” with the same financial accounts.
• Add Memos: This a great place to add those details that you might want to recall later. If you got coffee for networking, write in who you did the networking with. There’s also a trick where you can add the link to your receipts from your google drive/dropbox/one drive so that the transactions are ‘connected’ to the receipt if you ever want to look it up later.
• Use your own name when you withdraw the owner’s pay. Paying yourself is absolutely a business transaction, and you deserve to feel a little bit excited you’re paying yourself.