Income streams allow you to create and manage multiple businesses and/or properties in Coconut. You can assign an income stream to your business transactions to report on your expenses and income broken down by business and/or property, allowing you to easily prepare for your tax figures for HMRC.
In order to set this up you’ll need to do the following:
Create your income streams (one per business or property) and assign your primary
Assign income streams to your transactions
Create an income stream
Before you can assign an income stream to a transaction, you’ll need to create it in Coconut. When you first create a Coconut account, we’ll create your first income stream for you - you may want to update this with a new name or type based on your preference or add more to the list by following the steps below:
Navigate the 'More’ tab and under ‘Income streams’, click ‘Add income stream’.
This will open up a window where you need fill in the details of your income stream.
Give your income stream a name. This should be something you recognise and that you associate with your business.
Select a business type. This is the type that HMRC defines your business as. If you’re not sure, follow our guidance here.
If you selected a property type, you’ll have the option to set a % ownership. If you are the sole owner, leave this as 100%, otherwise, adjust this based on your % split in the property with other people. This will let us submit the correct calculation for income, expenses and tax saving suggestion for your property.
If this is a new income stream, you’ll also be able to set it as your primary income stream if you choose.
Setting a primary income stream
Setting an income stream as your primary means that whenever we capture a new business transaction through your connected bank feeds, we’ll automatically assign it to your primary income stream.
You’ll always need to have a primary income selected so we know where to assign your transactions, but you can change this at any time.
We recommend that you set your main business as your primary income stream. That way you’ll only ever need to change income stream on transactions for your other businesses.
To change your primary income stream, select your income stream from the list and toggle the 'Set as primary income stream' on and hit confirm.
Assign income stream
In order for Coconut to know which transactions belong to a given income stream, you’ll need to assign them. We’ll assign any new business transactions to your ‘primary income stream’ by default, but you can change it on the transactions too.
Assigning income streams to transactions works the same as assigning categories:
Find the transaction you want to change in your transaction list and tap on the transaction to open 'details' window.
Note: if you set the category to 'Personal' you won't be able to set an income stream as it's not a business transaction.
In the 'details' window, select your income stream from the drop-down menu. Note this will only show income streams that are ‘enabled’. Click ‘Save’ and you’re done!
Disable income stream
If you’ve set up an income stream but you’re not longer using it, you may want to ‘hide’ it, so that it no longer appears as a selection for use.
Navigate to ‘More’ tab and under ‘Income streams’, find the income stream you want to disable and tap the row.
In the Income stream window that displays, select ‘Disable income stream’ - this will bring up an alert where you can confirm whether or not you want to disable the income stream. Once confirmed, the income stream will be disabled meaning it won’t appear as an option in the dropdown menus.
You can re-enable an income stream at any time using the reverse process!
Change your Income Stream type
Sometimes you may need to change the type of an income stream. For example, if it was set up as the wrong type initially, or the type changes status (for example from UK Property to FHL). You can change the type any time by:
Going to the 'More' tab and tap 'Income streams'.
Tap on the income stream you want to change.
Select 'business type' and select a new type from the list and tap confirm.
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