A joint "bank" account?

I currently run a site a sports website with someone else purely for our enjoyment and as a non-profit endeavor (we're both huge fans of the team) so we pay for all the expenses out-of-pocket. I handle the domain/hosting fees, he pays for some other things, and sometimes we'll go 50/50 on contest prizes and the like. Sometimes we'll tell each other we're going to pay for something and other times we'll go out and make a purchase without informing the other person. As you may be able to tell, it's quite disorganized.

Going forward, I want to centralize our funds for the payment of any future costs. The best way I see to do this is to have just one account we can use for all site costs, expenses, etc. When money is needed, we would transfer funds from our personal accounts into it and then use those funds to pay the expenses. The benefits would be that our shares of the costs would be equal, it would require us to discuss the transaction beforehand, all those transactions will be documented, and we'll have 100% transparency in exactly what we're buying and who's paying for it to avoid future arguments. More importantly, if we sell merchandise in the future to help defray costs/expenses, all profits will go directly into the account rather than going to one of us first.

That being said, I saw that Paypal allows you to have secondary users on one account but I want to keep our personal accounts separate. Anyone have any suggestions on how to do this? Thanks in advance.

 

Set up another PayPal account that you can both access. I've got two, one for personal and one for business.

You can then both have an email address to access it.

Michael

 

Its always best to separate personal funds from business funds. Open new accounts for this venture.

 

I agree with this comment as well as the comments made by others. It's good to have a separate account if you can, and if you plan to allow more than one person to access it. Having a second account also ensures personal security in that (as much as you want to trust people) it prevents you from fear that you own money will be stolen.

 

Doesn't that need to be tied to a bank account or credit card though?