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) 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 to ‘My Profile’ 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, click on the action button on your income stream row and then click ‘Set as primary’. This will only apply to new transactions and won’t replace the income stream on any previous transactions.
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 click on the transaction to open the ‘edit’ 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 edit 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 ‘My Profile’ tab and under ‘Income streams’, find the income stream you want to disable and click on the three dots in right hand-side of the income stream row.
Select ‘Disable’ - this will bring up a window 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.
Bulk updates
If you want to update more than one transaction at once, you can do this using the re-categorise action in web:
Select all transactions as you want to update using the tickbox on the left hand-side of the transactions.
At the top right of the transaction table, a new button will appear ‘Re-categorise transactions’. Click it to open a new window.
In the re-categorise window update the income stream for all the selected transactions using the drop-down menu. Hit save and all of your selected transactions will now be updated with your selected income stream.
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 'My Profile' tab > 'Income Streams'
Click on the Actions button (3 dots) on the income stream you want to update
Select a new type from the list and click Save
Self-Assessment Reports
Once you have allocated transactions to income streams, you can view and download the reports you need from the 'Reports' tab for completing self-assessment filings. See the links below for more.
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