The Owner Pay System
You cannot tell how much of the balance in your business account is yours, so you pay yourself last out of whatever is left and discover in January that the tax money was spent.
View on Etsy (opens in a new tab)The current price is on Etsy. We make and sell this ourselves — this is not an affiliate link.
What’s inside
- Six parts in five files, led by the Allocation Calculator: split every payment four ways on the day it lands, with four running balances and the transfer to make. It handles platform fees and materials so you allocate from what actually landed.
- The Owner Pay Sustainability Model: put in twelve months of income and get one fixed monthly draw that survives your worst month, plus the month-by-month buffer projection that proves it.
- The Tax Set-Aside Rate Derivation Worksheet: five steps from your last filed return to your own rate. It prints no rate anywhere, because yours is not ours.
- The Account Structure Map, the Shortfall Protocol Card, and the Monthly Review Checklist: the accounts to open and the three most people open and never use, the ordered sequence for the month it does not work and the one account you never touch, and a fifteen-minute review of four numbers and one decision, twelve months to a page.
- The playbook that teaches all six parts, with two complete worked examples, a service business across twelve lumpy months and a maker with platform fees and materials, every figure shown and derived rather than asserted.
Who this is for
Most small business money advice records what happened. Almost none of it allocates what arrives, so the money sits in one account, every claim on it is invisible, and you are paid last out of whatever is left. That is a structure problem, not a discipline problem.
This is the other approach: split every payment on the day it lands, pay yourself a fixed amount you can actually live on, and stop discovering in January that the tax money was spent. What this adds is the derivation: the arithmetic that turns “I have no idea” into a number, the conversion from a profit-side tax rate to the revenue-side rate you actually allocate with, and a draw that holds through the month you earn least.