Ring-fencing the raise: pots for payroll, tax and reserves

A raise lands as one large number, and one large number is easy to spend faster than you mean to. Splitting it into clearly labelled pots makes the money easier to govern: you can see at a glance what is committed to payroll, what is set aside for tax, and what you must not touch.

This guide covers practical ways to ring-fence a round so your runway behaves predictably.

Why separate the raise into pots

When everything sits in one balance, it all looks spendable. Pots create a simple boundary: money earmarked for tax stops looking like money you can spend on hiring, and a reserve stops being raided for an unplanned cost.

The aim is not bureaucracy — it is to make the right behaviour the easy one, so you are not doing mental arithmetic every time you approve a payment.

The core pots to set up

A common setup uses a handful of clearly named pots or sub-accounts:

• Operating — the day-to-day account that bills, suppliers and cards draw from.
• Payroll — enough to cover salaries for the period you are planning, kept separate so a busy month never threatens a pay run.
• Tax — money set aside for amounts that will fall due, so the bill is not a surprise. Treat the figure as something to confirm with your accountant rather than a fixed rule.
• Reserve — a do-not-touch buffer for genuine emergencies, deliberately kept out of the day-to-day flow.

Splitting near-term cash from the long-term reserve

A useful split is to separate the next six months of expected spend from the rest of the runway. The near-term pot covers what you can actually see coming — payroll, known suppliers, committed costs. The longer-term pot holds the remainder.

This keeps your working balance focused on the immediate horizon and makes it obvious when you are starting to dip into money that was meant to last much longer. Review the split each month and top up the near-term pot from the long-term one on a schedule.

Converting a USD raise on a schedule

If you raised in USD but pay your team and suppliers in another currency, converting the whole amount at once exposes the entire runway to a single exchange rate on a single day. Converting in tranches on a schedule — for example a set amount each month to cover that month's spend — spreads that out and makes monthly costs more predictable.

A simple approach: keep the bulk of the raise in the currency it arrived in, and move roughly one month of spend into your operating currency at a regular cadence. Adjust the cadence to match your actual outgoings rather than a fixed calendar.

How Altery fits

Altery lets you hold multiple currencies in one account and organise funds so payroll, tax and reserves are visibly separate from your operating balance. You can keep the raise in the currency it came in and convert on the cadence that matches your spend, rather than all at once.

Frequently asked questions