Small Business Tips: Things to Make Your Life Easier
I’ve been running a small business and helping other people run their small businesses for more than 20 years, so I know firsthand the challenges entrepreneurs face. Here are some products and services I’ve found can help most small businesses run more effectively.
Cheap or Free Small Business Accounting Software
Bookkeeping is important and accounting software is the backbone of any successful small business. As such, here are some recommendations for cheap or even free small business accounting software.
Wave Accounting: Free (optional payroll add-on is $1-$5 per month per employee)
Wave Accounting is terrific small business accounting software. It’s not so great if you just want personal finance software, but it’s quite adaptable with some workarounds. The best part, though, is you can’t beat the price: it’s free!
Not a free trial, either, or a free limited version with an option to pay for an upgrade to the version you probably wanted in the first place, we’re talking totally free accounting software. Best of all, it runs entirely in the cloud and supports multiple users. Wave makes its money by displaying ads for companies with products and services that are likely to interest people using free online accounting software.
There’s an optional payroll processing add-on which costs from $1 to $5 per month per employee (depending on the number of employees on your payroll), but the payroll service doesn’t really do anything you can’t already do with the regular software (it just saves time and is probably well worth the nominal cost if your small business needs to do payroll processing).
Wave optionally integrates with Shoeboxed and other complementary online services, plus it’s even got built-in payment processing powered by Stripe (my favorite PayPal alternative). You can email an invoice to your client and they can click to pay you by credit or debit card directly from the invoice. How cool is that? Stripe charges a small card processing fee (similar to PayPal’s fees) on a per-transaction basis, but Wave doesn’t tack on fees for the integration.
Did I mention Wave Accounting is free? Go sign up and give it a try because you have absolutely nothing to lose. One business with which I’m involved saw an entire quarter of month-over-month revenue increases after switching their bookkeeping system over to Wave and I’ve loved the software ever since.
TaxSlayer Books: $4.95 per month
TaxSlayer Books is another online accounting software option I recommend. I use TaxSlayer Books in addition to Wave Accounting for handling different aspects of my businesses and they’re both excellent. TaxSlayer Books costs a nominal $4.95 per month, but it’s hard to beat their trial offer: try the software for free and start paying only if/when you think it’s worth paying for.
Whether it’s a month, two months, three months, six months or even longer down the road, you never pay unless and until you think it’s worth the expense. The honor system beats automatic monthly billing any day, in my book.
Tax Preparation Software
A good accountant can be worth their weight in gold, but if your tax preparation needs are modest (as they are for many small businesses), doing it yourself is sometimes the best way to go. I’ve never personally been a fan of Intuit’s TurboTax (mainly just because I hate Intuit). I used to love Kiplinger’s TaxCut, but the product seemed to get more buggy and bloated with each subsequent release from H&R Block so I finally ditched it. Here are some good alternatives.
Taxslayer 2013: $0 to $39.90
TaxSlayer is currently my favorite tax preparation software and it’s an online service so there’s nothing to download and install. They offer a free edition, but it’s only for people filing a simple federal 1040EZ (if you can read all the words on this page, you have more than enough skill to fill out a 1040EZ; if you really feel the need to pay somebody to fill out a 1040EZ for you, please contact me and I’ll gladly take your money). For $39.90, you can e-file your federal return as well as one state return (assuming your state lets you e-file; Kentucky does).
TaxSlayer supports filing all federal and state income tax returns, including all required schedules (Schedule C, Schedule K-1, etc.). It can even be used for filing a free extension if necessary. TaxSlayer also offers free federal and state filing for all active-duty military personnel.
Paperless Office
While going completely paperless is still a bit of a pipe dream in most cases, there are some services I recommend for helping you go nearly paperless.
Shoeboxed: $0 to $49.95 per month
Shoeboxed is a service which scans receipts and other paper documents so you can file them electronically and eliminate some of the paper clutter in your office.
While intended mainly for receipts and business cards, Shoeboxed can actually scan any document up to 8.5 inches wide by as much as 3 feet long. I like to use it for archiving old sports rosters, press releases and game statistics — things I need to keep on file but rarely ever access. I’m also thinking of using it to archive notes from stories, but sometimes I write on the backs of the pages in my notebooks so I’ll need to do some testing.
Once they receive your documents at their office in Durham, N.C. (no offshore outsourcing here), Shoeboxed scans and uploads them directly to your private account. They offer a 30-day free trial on all plans with monthly pricing for the service ranging from $9.95 to $49.95 (they also have a free plan for storing your own scans).
Plans $29.95 and above include prepaid “Magic Envelopes” which you simply stuff full of receipts and other documents and drop in the mail — they’re already pre-coded for your account, so there’s nothing to fill out! I love this service and I’m hoping to post a full review when I have some time.
Backups and data security
CrashPlan: $59.99/year for 1 computer, $149.99/year for 2-10 computers
CrashPlan Pro: $9.99/month per computer
CrashPlan and its business version, CrashPlan Pro, are by far my favorite online backup services. Both services offer reasonably-priced options for unlimited data storage and their software is more elegant (not to mention less clunky) than with some other services. I’ve also never noticed any performance hit by leaving it running on my dual-core laptop.
Best of all, the CrashPlan software runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and even Solaris, so cross-platform compatibility won’t be a problem for Linux users or people working in a mixed network environment.
The consumer-focused CrashPlan offers unlimited data storage for backing up one computer for just $59.99 per year. That’s basically $5 a month, so you can have total peace of mind with regard to the safety and security of your personal data for about the same cost of one overpriced commercial beverage per month. That’s a bargain in my book!
CrashPlan also offers a “family plan” for $149.99 per year which allows you to backup anywhere from two to 10 separate computer, all of which share the same unlimited data storage allotment.
One caveat: the family plan doesn’t allow for creating multiple user accounts (that’s only found in CrashPlan Pro), so every connected computer will have to log in using the same email address and password combination.
CrashPlan Pro, their business-oriented offering, offers full multi-user support with a lot of granularity on the security settings administrators can assign. The unlimited data storage option for CrashPlan Pro is $9.99 per month per computer; slightly higher than the consumer version, but as a power user I prefer the added features.
Self-employed home office users might rightfully wonder if they should choose the home- or business-oriented version of the service and that’s a tough question sometimes. Creative professionals (especially, ahem, photographers) may find their data backup needs legitimately fit within the terms of use for both editions. Whether or not you’re using something for “business” purposes as defined by the company selling it can be a gray area for many SoHo users.
One more warning: According to a CrashPlan rep I spoke with before signing up, there is no migration path from the home to pro version because they’re considered two separate products for two different markets. You’re of course free to switch to CrashPlan Pro any time you like, but you’ll have to upload all your data again if you do so. Not a big deal at all if you’ve got 20 gigabytes or so, but a much bigger deal if you’ve got closer to a terabyte.
It’s also worth noting CrashPlan offers the option of copying all your data to an external hard drive and shipping it to them for immediate upload to their data center. There’s an additional fee for that optional service, but it means all your data is immediately backed up and you’ll be protected 24/7 from the get-go. Like with any cloud-based backup service, the biggest bottleneck is the initial upload (after initial seeding, CrashPlan does incremental uploads).
CrashPlan also offers an option to have a new hard drive pre-loaded with your backup data shipped to you in the event of a catastrophic hard drive crash on your system, so you can just swap out the drives and be back up and running without even skipping a beat.
The company’s also been in business since 2001, it’s headquartered in Minnesota (nothing freaks you out quite like somebody with a Minnesota accent answering the support line at a tech company) and they offer free service to active-duty military personnel, so there’s pretty much nothing about this company I do not like. I wish I could say that more often. Give CrashPlan a try (no credit card required for their free trial) and I think you’ll like it every bit as much as I do.