The business bank account built for the self-employed and small businesses.

Sole traders, and limited companies with up to two owners, where the business is UK-based and the owners are UK tax residents, with a balance limit of up to £1 million. That rules out companies with three or more shareholders, most partnerships and businesses with overseas ownership — worth checking before you spend time on an application. Eligible deposits are protected up to £85,000 by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. If you do not fit the criteria, say so and we will talk about what else works rather than pretending the answer is universal.

No, and nothing in your accountancy service depends on it. We work with whatever bank you use, and the practical requirement is simply that the account has a reliable feed into your accounting software. The reason this partnership exists is that a separate business account with a clean feed removes a large amount of avoidable bookkeeping work, particularly for sole traders who are still running business income through a personal account. If your current bank does that job well, there is no reason to move.

This is a commercial partnership between Buzz and Mettle, by NatWest, rather than a neutral recommendation, and you should read it that way. What we would say for it on the merits: the account is free to open and run, it is built for sole traders and small companies rather than adapted from a corporate product, and it comes with a proper bank behind it and FSCS protection on eligible deposits. What it is not is the right answer for every business. If you want an entirely independent comparison, several exist and we would not object to you using one.

A limited company does, in practice — the company is a separate legal person and its money is not yours, so mixing them creates director's loan account problems and makes the accounts unreliable. A sole trader is not legally required to have one, but running everything through a personal account is a false economy: it makes bookkeeping slower and more expensive, makes expense claims harder to defend if HMRC asks, and makes Making Tax Digital record-keeping considerably more painful. The cost of a separate account is almost always less than the cost of untangling one that was shared.

Through a bank feed, which pulls transactions into FreeAgent, Xero or whichever package you use, so they arrive for coding rather than being typed in. Setting it up takes a few minutes and requires you to authorise the connection from your side — we cannot do it without you, by design. Two things to know: feeds occasionally drop and need re-authorising, usually after a password change or a security update, and a feed reconciling does not mean the coding is right. Somebody still has to say what each payment was actually for.

It happens, most often because of the eligibility criteria — three or more owners, a partnership structure, or non-UK-resident ownership — rather than anything to do with credit. A decline on an account application is not the same as a credit refusal and does not sit on your file the way a rejected loan does. If it happens, tell us the reason given and we will look at what else fits how your business is actually structured. Where you need borrowing rather than banking, that is a different conversation — see business financial services.