Paying out cash prizes from a website using a personal current account?

Continuing the discussion from Lloyds current account / mobile app: Any good?:

The website in question isn’t a business. It’s not owned by my company. It’s my personal property.

I don’t use the prize payouts as a tax write-off. The money comes from my own personal current account (post tax, obvs).

Cash prizes are VAT exempt, as far as I can tell.

Is there any kind of issue with me paying the prizes in this way? In case anyone’s wondering, the site in question is Removed

Ideally I’d like to run the site under my company in order that I might be able to treat the prize money as an expense (if this is allowed). I assume I’d need to sell the website to my company first at a fair price (which I’d hope would be £1 as the site is loss-making!).

Any advice would be appreciated.

Your thread bought this thread on Monzo to mind

From the perspective of using your Monzo account I don’t think it’s so much whether or not it is a business but whether or not Monzo will accept what you are doing doesn’t consitute a business operation

I don’t think you have to sell the website to your company but if you where turning it into a business you may want to consider whether or not you can setup some kind of loan in the company to reimburse your reasonable costs to date for getting it started

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Thanks for the advice @anon85728687.

I contacted Monzo and it turns out @NickCagey was right. They want me to switch to a business account in order to pay out cash prizes from my website.

Unfortunately Monzo don’t yet offer the “send money with a link” feature for business accounts.

So I’ll probably end up using PayPal for the transfers and will look into the option that @anon85728687 described for the website.

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Have I missed a feature? I thought the monzo.me links were for receiving money to your account, not sending the money out?

It’s not Monzo.me, but you can pay people by sending them a link. It takes them to a web page where they input their sort code and account number, and the money gets sent to their account.

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Oh wow, I didn’t know that was a thing

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