Accounting for Shared Expenses
When you work from home, some of your regular household expenses turn into business expenses as well. Any expenditure that benefits both your living space and your workspace is considered an indirect expense; these include things such as electricity and real estate taxes.
To figure out the portion that's deductible for business purposes, you can use a simple ratio. Measure the space you use for your work area, either in square feet or number of rooms (whatever makes sense), and divide that by the space in your whole house. For example, if you have a four-room apartment and use one room exclusively for business, you would use one-fourth as your ratio. Then apply that ratio to each shared expense to come up with the business portion. If the electric bill for that four-room apartment came to $100, you can record $25 as a business expense.
The journal entry here depends on how you paid the expense. If you paid the entire bill with a personal check, your journal entry includes a debit to the applicable expense account and a credit to owner's equity; paying business expenses with a personal check counts as a capital contribution. If you used two separate checks to pay the bill (a personal check for the personal portion, and a company check for the business portion), you record your journal entry just like any other cash disbursement: debit expense and credit cash.