Businesses and Trades
One business files one Schedule C. If you genuinely run two, keep them apart all year — and read your books one trade at a time.
A business here means what the IRS means by a trade or business: the unit that files a Schedule C. Most people have exactly one, and for them this page is invisible by design — nothing asks which business anything belongs to, because there's only ever one answer.
Add a second only if you really do run two — a photography business and a rental property, say. Two businesses means two Schedule Cs, kept apart all year.
You Already Have One
Every account is created with one business, and everything you've tracked belongs to it. You've probably never seen it — the word "business" doesn't appear as a choice anywhere until there are two of them.
It's almost certainly called "My Business". Your account is created with that placeholder before you've told us anything, and renaming your business elsewhere in Settings doesn't rename it — those are different fields. The first thing to do on this page is give it its real name.
Three names exist and they're genuinely different things:
- Business Name (Settings → Organization) — what the app calls you.
- Legal Business Name (Settings → Organization → Invoice Details) — what appears on your invoices.
- Name on this page — the trade that files a Schedule C.
Managing Them
Go to Settings → Businesses (/dashboard/settings/businesses). Owner or admin only.
Press Add a business and give it a Name. Legal name and EIN are optional (the EIN is recorded for your reference; nothing files with it yet). You can Edit any row to change those, or add a Logo.
Once you have two, a business switcher appears above your figures on Expenses, Charges, Invoices, Sales and the Tax Center. Pick a trade to read its books alone, or All for everything together. Your choice follows you from page to page.
What Belongs to Which
Most things don't ask. A client, an expense, a charge, a mileage entry — each quietly belongs to your default business, and an invoice takes its business from the client it bills. That's deliberate: making you answer the same question on every form would be a tax on having one business, paid by everyone.
You choose explicitly in only three places:
- Recording a sale — a Business dropdown in the sheet.
- Creating an internal project (one with no client) — there's no client to inherit from.
- Connecting a Stripe revenue account — "Book this revenue to".
There's no UI for moving a client between businesses, and it's refused while that client still owns a project on the old one — a client and its projects have to stay together.
How Each Business Counts Money
Schedule C asks, on Line F, whether you count income when the money moves or when you send the invoice. Each business answers separately — two trades in one year can legitimately be counted two different ways.
You answer it at Tax → How your numbers are counted (/dashboard/tax) — the heading names the year you're looking at:
- When the money moves — income counts when you get paid, expenses when you pay them. (Cash. This is what most solo businesses do, and it's what we count until you say otherwise.)
- When you send the invoice — income counts when you bill it, expenses when you owe them. (Accrual.)
With two or more businesses you tick which ones your answer applies to. If they end up counting differently, the Tax Center says so, permanently, above the fold — that's allowed, but it should be on purpose.
Changing an answer partway through needs IRS approval (Form 3115) and moves numbers you may already have reported, so switching an existing election asks you to confirm you understand that.
Finishing Up a Year
When you're done with a year — filed, or just done looking at it — Tax → Finish up, which names that year on the button, wraps it up. After that, anything that changes shows up in the following year instead of quietly moving numbers you already reported.
Nothing is deleted or hidden. It sets a line in the sand: corrections that would have landed before it get posted forward instead, tagged as belonging to the earlier year. Everything before the line keeps reproducing the figures you filed.
You can Unlock it again at any time. Unlocking asks for a reason in a few words, and that reason goes on the record.
One control, every business. Storage is per business, but finishing up a year seals all of your businesses for that year together — archived ones included — in a single step. There's no per-business close, and a business created after a close inherits it, so it can't become the one trade whose filed year stays writable.
After you finish up any year, no business in your account can be deleted again. Every business gets a record for that year, and those records are permanent by design — they're what makes a filed year reproducible. Archive is the way out from then on. This is worth knowing before you close your first year.
Archiving vs Deleting
Archive a business you've stopped trading as. It's hidden from the pickers and takes no new work — but its history, reports and exports are untouched, and it keeps appearing in your business switcher, the Tax Center and every export with an archived tag.
Existing invoices under an archived business stay fully sendable and payable. Archiving must never strand money you're still owed.
Archiving is refused while any client on that trade still has live recurring billing — you'd be silently stopping invoices that would never be created. ClientCasa names those clients and asks you to pause or move their billing first.
Delete only works while a business owns nothing at all — no clients, projects, charges, expenses, invoices or posted books. If it has traded, archive it instead so its history and its Schedule C survive.
Your default business can be neither archived nor deleted.
Related
- Export for Taxes — the Schedule C summary renders one form per business.
- Record a Sale — one of the three places you pick a business explicitly.
- Revenue Connections — a connected Stripe account books to one trade.
- Set Up Taxes — your tax profile and estimates.