Automate your business savings for rainy days
If you haven’t started saving your business income yet, that wouldn’t be too hard to believe. Running a business can be a cash intensive process, banking has historically been a cumbersome industry to engage with, and there are only so many hours within the day. However, having no business savings can be a dangerous position for your business to operate from.
If an emergency happens, and you don’t have business savings, you may have to dip into personal savings or even worse, rely on potentially high interest credit to tide you over. Simply put: without savings, your business is at risk. By automatically saving, you’re building up a capital for your business to use in emergencies or when you have something you’d like to invest in.
Luckily, banking has evolved a bit since the completely paper and in-person days of not that long ago, and opening a business savings account can be done from your laptop or phone, within an hour. You don’t have to wait for your bank to be open or schedule a time to meet with a banker, you can now just sign up on Square or open a savings account from your mobile debit account.
If you’re a Square user for invoices or otherwise, something that you really should be using is Square Balance. This is effectively a high interest savings account that can exist within your Square account. If you invoice customers with Square or use Square Register, you can automate a percentage of all transactions to be saved to your Balance. Square Balance pays out a APY of .5%, which is far and away a better interest rate than most (if not all) in-person retail banks.
By saving a flat percentage of all your business transactions using Square Balance, you’re building a reserve of capital for your business over time that can be accessed whenever your business needs it. If you transact a large amount of small ticket individual orders as a coffee shop or retail store, it may make sense to only save a small percentage and let that build up for a few months. If you transact larger amounts less frequently using Square Invoices, automatically saving a larger percentage may be a good strategy to develop savings.
If you don’t use Square for invoices, use another online payment processor, or use a different digital POS, you may not have automated savings natively. Check with your payment processor to see if they offer savings, and if those savings can be automated. Worst comes to worse, whatever bank you use for your business savings will have some sort of automated savings program, likely based on time.
Developing savings for your business can be a safety net in emergencies, or a reserve of capital to deploy for growing your business and increasing sales. Saving as much as you can will never be a bad investment, as it will always be money that can be withdrawn if needed. Saving money isn’t like other investments that lose and gain value over time, it is a relatively stable fund of money that is available to your business whenever it is needed. Save as much as you can, and maybe even a little more, because that money can be withdrawn again. What payment processor do you use for your business?
