SIL House Funds vs Personal Funds: Keeping House Money Separate Without the Spreadsheet

⏱ 7 min read👤 CareIQ Team

In a Supported Independent Living home, two kinds of money move through the same front door: shared house money for groceries, utilities and household items, and each resident's own personal money. Mixing them is one of the fastest ways to lose a family's trust and to fail a quality review. Here is how to keep them apart in practice.

Why separating house and personal funds matters

Residents in SIL homes are often supported with daily spending. Staff buy groceries for the house, pay for a resident's haircut, top up a phone or buy a birthday present. When those transactions all come out of one tin, one card or one spreadsheet tab, nobody can say afterwards whose money paid for what.

That creates three problems. Families and guardians ask questions you cannot answer. Residents can end up subsidising the house, or the house subsidising one resident. And when a reviewer or auditor asks how participants' money is safeguarded, a mixed ledger is very hard to defend.

What counts as house money and what counts as personal money

House funds

Shared groceries and household consumables
Cleaning products and shared toiletries
Household items used by everyone (kitchenware, linen, furniture)
Shared outings agreed by the household

Personal funds

Clothing, personal toiletries and personal items
Hairdressing, phone and subscriptions
Gifts, hobbies and individual outings
Anything the resident chose for themselves

Write your own list down, agree it with residents and their families, and put it in your house procedures. Grey areas (a takeaway dinner the whole house shared, for example) should have a rule rather than a judgement call each time.

⚠ The most common mistake

Using personal money to cover a house shortfall "just until the next top-up". Even when it is paid back, it breaks the separation and is almost impossible to evidence later.

A simple routine that works

Separate accounts or tins. One house float or card, and one record per resident for personal money.
Every transaction recorded at the time. Who spent, how much, on what, from which fund, with the receipt attached.
Allocations, not transfers. When the house buys something one resident benefits from, record who it was for - but keep the money in the fund it came from.
Regular reconciliation. Count cash and match receipts weekly; a coordinator signs off.
Family visibility. Be able to show a resident or guardian exactly what was spent from their money.

Why spreadsheets break down

A spreadsheet can work for one house and one careful coordinator. With several houses, rotating staff and receipts in glove boxes, it breaks: tabs drift, formulas get overwritten, and nobody knows which version is current. Receipts end up in a different place from the ledger.

How CareIQ handles SIL house funds

In CareIQ, SIL house funds are kept separate from residents' personal funds, so house spending stays house spending. It sits in the same system as the house's residents, rosters and shift checklists. CareIQ keeps improving this area as providers tell us how they run their houses.

See how it fits with the rest of running a house on our SIL software page.

Run every SIL house from one system

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