Private withdrawal (yksityisnosto): what does it mean?

As a sole trader (toiminimi), your income is not treated the same as the pay a light entrepreneur or an employee receives. It's your business's income, and when it's paid out to you, it's called a private withdrawal.

What is a private withdrawal?

In the eyes of the tax authorities and bookkeeping, you and your business are one and the same person. Put simply, this means you can't pay yourself a salary. Instead of paying a salary, you withdraw money from your business account for your personal use - hence the term private withdrawal.

When you invoice under your toiminimi through Truster, we transfer money to your personal account from our client funds account. This way you get the money to use without it being recorded as a business expense in your bookkeeping, and it therefore doesn't affect your company's result. Worth mentioning with the Pro Light service is that all the money that arrives in your account is yours to use, since Truster has already deducted all statutory payments from the payout. So you won't run into a situation where you'd have to remit part of your withdrawals to the tax authorities later, for example as VAT. We take care of that too!

Payment details always available

In the app, open Menu and click Company transactions. You can either browse all transactions or filter the results by time or category.

If you need (or want) to download more detailed reports as a PDF, go to Company information in the Menu and click Downloadable reports. From here you can download all the reports related to your bookkeeping for the period you want.

How do I prove my income?

You may have already guessed that a sole trader's income doesn't produce a pay statement. If you did, you guessed right.

Sole traders, too, sometimes get requests, for one reason or another, from an authority or a lender who needs proof of income received. Since there's no pay statement, reports can be used as an official record of income received. The Income statement is the most typical document, as it serves as a summary of your company's income and expenses. Always pay close attention, though, to the exact documents required in the request, as well as the period the documents are requested for.

The entrepreneur's income doesn't appear in the Incomes Register

A sole trader's income and expenses are reported to the tax authorities once a year on the business tax return. When you use the Pro Light service, Truster files the return for you. We ask for clarifying details via a tax return questionnaire whenever the year changes.

Private withdrawals are therefore not registered in the Incomes Register. You can track your income during the year using the reports available in the app.