Picture a fabric seller in Balogun. Month-end comes, her account says ₦180,000, and she can’t tell you whether the business made money. The shop rent, the restocking, her children’s school fees and a cousin’s wedding contribution all left the same account.
That is what mixing money does. It isn’t really a discipline problem, it’s a fog problem. Until the two are apart, you can’t tell whether you have a sales problem, a spending problem, or neither.
What mixing costs you
Three things, and only the first is obvious. You don’t know your real profit, so you underprice or overstock without noticing. You can’t show a lender or a supplier numbers they would believe, which matters the day you want credit. And you quietly pay for household life out of working capital, which is how a business can have a busy December and still be broke in February.
Start with two accounts
Open a second account and run the business through it. Nothing fancy. If the business is registered with the CAC, banks usually ask for the registration documents and a TIN for a corporate account, and the tax authority behind that TIN is now the Nigeria Revenue Service, which replaced FIRS this year. Our business registration guide covers the CAC steps, costs and funding. If you aren’t registered yet, a separate account in your own name that only the business touches is still a big step up from one pot.
Pay yourself a salary
This is the step that fixes most of it. Decide a fixed amount you take from the business each month, move it on a set date, and treat everything else as the business’s money.
Back to the fabric seller. Sales of ₦1,200,000, stock and running costs of ₦850,000, so a profit of ₦350,000. She pays herself ₦150,000 on the 28th. The other ₦200,000 stays in the business for restocking and a buffer. Now she knows two things she didn’t before: the business made ₦350,000, and it can comfortably afford her salary. If profit had only been ₦100,000, the same system would have told her the salary was too high before she spent it, not after.
Set the salary from what the business earns, not from what the household needs. If those two numbers don’t match, that is the real conversation, and it is cheaper to have it over a spreadsheet than over an empty till.
When you take money out anyway
You will, once or twice. Emergencies don’t check which account they’re coming from. Take it, but write it down as a loan to yourself with the date and amount, and pay it back when you can. If you don’t, it stays invisible and your profit figure is wrong again.
In a limited company this matters more. The law treats the company as its own person, so money moving out casually can raise legal and tax questions. If that’s you, have one conversation with an accountant.
Keep the paperwork light
A notebook or a basic spreadsheet is enough. Money in, money out, one line each, ten minutes a week. The point isn’t accounting for its own sake. It’s that at month-end you can answer ‘did we make money?’ with a number.
Spare cash in the business doesn’t have to sit idle while you wait to restock. How money market funds work explains one place it can earn something, and the cash or money market fund question applies the same logic to a buffer. And if you’re still deciding whether to put money into a business at all, the ₦1 million piece covers when that makes sense.
Sources: Techpoint Africa (2026) on CAC registration, TIN and corporate account steps. The figures above are an example, not a benchmark. This is general information, not accounting or legal advice.
