Revenue Allocation & Tax Set-Aside
Most owners pay expenses first and call whatever survives profit. This template reverses the order: every incoming payment is split the moment it lands, and the operating account only ever sees its own share.
The split is five buckets and has to total exactly 100% — the sheet checks and says so. In the sample data it is 20% tax, 15% owner pay, 50% operating, 10% profit and reserve, 5% equipment fund. Those proportions are yours to argue with; what matters is that they are decided once, in advance, rather than discovered at the end of each month.
Twelve months of inflows then show what each bucket should have received: on 5,403,000 of money in, 1,080,600 belongs to tax and never belonged to the business. The account table below compares what was allocated, what has been paid out, what should therefore remain, and what is actually sitting there. In the sample every bucket is short, and the tax one by 158,600 — money that went somewhere else and will have to come back when the return falls due.
The second sheet tests the mechanism against a real quarter. Three months of setting aside accumulate 250,600 against a bill of 238,000, leaving 12,600 to roll forward. It also works backwards: the effective rate the bill actually demands, so you can compare it with the share you chose. If the bucket keeps falling short, the percentage is wrong, not the discipline.
The reason this works is unglamorous. Expenses expand to fill whatever account they are paid from, so capping the operating share is uncomfortable for one month and then becomes the new normal — the same mechanism that makes a standing order beat good intentions. Finmap separates money by purpose automatically, which is the version of this that survives a busy quarter.
