Entrepreneurs CFOWhat you pay yourself

Money you take out of the company has to wear a name. A wage runs through the payroll provider, with tax withheld, and it shows up as pay. A draw is you taking profit or capital, and it should not pretend to be a vendor bill. When the two are mixed, the month can look profitable and broke at the same time, and the return inherits the confusion.

Wage or draw is your choice after you see what each one does to cash and to the year. We lay the closed months out and show what each name does to cash and to the year. You choose. If the books have been calling everything an expense, the first job is to stop, name the transfers, and only then talk about what the wage should be going forward.

You stay the employer if there is a payroll. The amount you pick gets typed into the payroll system you already pay to run. We do not run the Friday. We care that the stub, the books, and the draw list agree. The amount stays in your file. It is not a figure this site will publish.

A wage decided in October can still belong to this year. A wage discovered in March belongs to a story you can no longer edit. That is why this page sits next to October. We would rather have an awkward conversation while the months are open than a tidy one after the return has nowhere to put the truth.

The conversation is practical. What did you actually take. What did the company need to keep. What would a regular wage have looked like if you had set it in January. We use the closed months as the evidence. We do not use a rule of thumb from a stranger's company, and we do not print your figure here.

If you have not taken anything, that is also a fact. A founder who has been unpaid for a year is subsidizing the company. The statements should show that subsidy instead of hiding it inside a fat margin. Seeing it is often the first time the line on the screen makes emotional sense.

We will not invent a wage to make a return look a certain way, and we will not ignore a wage you already paid. Both moves break the tie between the provider, the books, and the return. A line for wages on the return should trace back to those stubs. Each stub should trace to a withdrawal the bank already shows.

We also will not set up payroll as a way to start running payday from this practice. Setup is the conversation, the accounts, and the first correct mapping. Once the first run lands, their calendar, not ours, owns every following Friday. If you do not have a provider yet, we help you pick one you will actually run. We do not become it.

If a lender wants your pay to look different from what the bank shows, we will not help with that costume. We will show you the closed months and let you decide what to tell them. A costume is how a founder ends up afraid of their own file.