

Ask HN: Partners and Expenses - jeff925

Hackers of all fields...<p>I've been running a small software development business with a partner for about a year now, we haven't yet withdrawn any money from the business, but we would like to be able to "expense" our different major purchases, such as necessary laptops and other equipment.  One problem we've been trying to address is how to purchase different equipment at different prices, and maintain "50%" equity in the company.  One idea we've had is to put in equal amounts of up-front re-investment, and reimbursing each of us from these "investments" at year end.  The problem there is that there may be a "surplus" from the partner who did not use their whole "hardware" investment...<p>Thoughts?<p>Jeff
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bkrausz
1) Consider it company hardware such that if one of you leaves they must give
up the hardware.

2) Each of you has to sign off on the other's purchase, that way neither of
you can spend too extravagantly. You should trust each other enough not to
work to game the system, and this should put a good enough check in place to
prevent it (again assuming some amount of trust).

~~~
jeff925
Great points, we do approve each others purchases now and do not have a
problem with trust. I should clarify my question is to identify how to handle
"nice to have" purchases which each of us agree are not essential but would
improve our "personal experiences". Ultimately, we would purchase these items
on a "personal" level, but we would like to be able to expense these items as
they are helpful tools for our company and to stay up-to-date with latest
technologies and trends...

One such instance of this was the "purchase" of personal iPhones/iTouches
which were not "essential" for developing our experimental iPhone App, but
they did help the process along...

