Slashdot Mirror
Best Open Source Business Tools?
An anonymous reader writes "My wife and I started an S Corp in 2009 mainly to provide small scale consulting services for friends with small businesses of their own (we build them websites and do odd technical jobs). Now that the year is closing I'm giving thought to our corporate tax filings which will be due March 15th. I've scoured the web for free/open source legal templates for hiring contractors, issuing W-2s, keeping shareholder minute meetings, etc, but haven't been able to find any decent sources. It seems like this should be a priority of the open source community since reducing the cost of entry into small business could drive open source development. What are the best sources of open source legal templates, tax filing software, corporate compliance templates, etc?" What experiences have others had with open sources businesses and the best way to consolidate the necessary corporate mojo into a workable model?
I would expect business software like that is the type that would run well under wine.
I agree that this could only be a good thing. However, most of the Open Source community consists of developers, sysadmins, and other technically-minded folks. By contrast, this is more of a legal issue.
I also wonder if anyone who provides such open-source legal templates might be exposing himself to liability. Suppose someone uses such a template and it turns out to be incorrect, even by some minor technicality, and as a result that person has additional legal expenses or other damages. They just might try to sue the person who produced the template. Unlike software, where disclaiming liability is a standard practice, legal advice or legal documents might be much more problematic. I am definitely not a lawyer but I hope a lawyer might take a moment to explain whether this is a legitimate concern.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I'm not an expert in this field, but it would surprise me greatly if there were Free templates of the sort you seek. For starters, most business law is governed by state law rather than federal law, so the requirements will depend in large part on where you are incorporated.
Second, the sources for those templates would generally be the experts who derive their living from selling that sort of information (i.e. lawyers, accountants, tax firms, etc.) It is in their own financial best interests not to give away that which they need to make their own ends meet. Business law and tax law are very convoluted and generally require quite a bit of specialization.
I can see the possibility of Free tools for W2s and meeting minutes, but I'm skeptical as to the availability of legal and taxation materials. Also, even if they were available, I would go in with both eyes open because as a business owner, you're on the hook for making sure you're using correct and current information, and taxes in particular change with alarming regularity.
----------
Something cleverI believe lwn.net wrote an article on this topic and IIRC didn't have much luck... I can't currently find it, but it should be on the site somewhere... or maybe someone will post the direct link.
The answer is there is none. Tax laws change yearly and unless get a team of lawyers from each state to donate their services to an open source project the software will not comply with those changes.
You are wasting your time.
The reason I say this is that, IME, OSS doesn't really deal very well with very niche requirements that aren't directly related to technology or anything that is not interesting from a technological standpoint.
Sending, relaying and receiving email? There's a plethora of products.
Writing a web application? Again, more options than I can even contemplate.
Filling out your tax return or paying your staff? One or two options which are generally terrible. Frankly, tax software is a fairly simple problem: start with a few numbers, add/subtract/multiply a few other numbers, send a cheque for the result to the tax man. The technically interesting bit is writing a generic engine to deal with whatever addition/subtraction/multiplication is necessary but writing the rules for that engine to deal with the various tax laws worldwide is mind-numbingly boring and there's no standard way such as an internationally agreed XML schema for the taxman to publish this years' tax legislation.
Software for your specific business niche? By definition, a niche.
Groupware? The only reason anyone's writing replacements for Exchange is because they can't stand Exchange. It's a mind-numbingly boring set of problems that nobody in their right mind is going to go near unless Exchange has seriously pissed them off or there's real money in it.
You want legal forms generated by Phil Grognard from his basement? No thanks - I trust Phil (mostly) to write software that doesn't crash all the time, but I don't want him looking out for my legal interests, and I don't particularly believe that he understands, for example, the limits of nondisclosure agreements with regard to pre-existing works in my particular state. Just use the Nolo books. They are inexpensive, far less expensive than 10 minutes of an attorney's time (literally).
http://www.ssa.gov/employer/
Call me old fashion, but I am a firm believer of do on thing and to it well. Your list of requests have a very broad scope and it wasn't clear if you expected one software package to do all of it. There are many great open source software packages for use with business.
GnuCash is an excellent accounting system to help you keep your financial accounts organized. I'm not really sure what is entailed with 'issuing a W-2' other than handing your employee a form. I have seen various companies use a combination wiki, dms and cms, all of which have many open source choices, to organize corporate data, and serve it in an clean and clear fashion to interested parties.
As far as tax filing software, it looks like this is not a foreign question to slashdot:
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/09/011259
One of the products offered in the above link is: http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/ Open Tax Solver
I am unclear what you mean by legal template. If you mean pre-formated document, OpenOffice.org has a large collection of templates you can browse through. If you mean canned agreements and contracts, they are around on the web, if you search for them. I must add IANAL so be careful using any generalized contract.
If you're doing well in your business, you won't have time to dick around creating "legal" documents and preparing your own taxes. That's what CPAs, and attorneys are for. If you had hired one of the two, he probably would have advised you to form an LLC rather than an S-Corp. But since you decided you knew better, you made a LOT more work for yourself.
And it's boring.
It is unlikely for an open source project to tackle it and keep up to date.
Sorry but things with ramifications like tax filings do belong in the hands of professionals. This isn't an area to do on the cheap.
You can get quickbooks from intuit for around $200 that will provide a lot of that. I also use a payroll company for $40/month to handle all the taxes and filings for payroll.
The issues here are legal, not technical, and you *need* to have legally competent people backing the products that you use in these domains. Also, tax law changes on an annual basis. Intuit has a team of lawyers helping them stay abreast, as does my payroll company. You do not want to end up in front of the IRS (or worse, tax court) and not have a leg to stand on.
I hate to say it, but it costs money to be in business. I just saw statistics a few days ago that 1/4 of payroll tax forms (941s) are erroneous, with the average cost being $670. Do the math. It's cheaper to pay the pros up front. I could go on and on, but, take it from me. I've paid plenty due to stupidity over the years. It's cheaper to put the right professionals in place to support you in your non-core tasks in the same way that people have put *you* in place to support them in their non-core tasks.
Do you have ESP?
So, on December 21, 2009 you have decided it might be a good idea to have some accounting and corporate secretarial records for the year 2009? Here's some free business advice - this is really something you want to sort out BEFORE you start operating, at least in draft form. Knocking up a bunch of retrospective meeting minutes, W-2s etc from memory and a box of unsorted receipts or correspondence is NOT a good idea.
That doesn't mean you have to become an expert accountant/lawyer yourself, but you should know the key ideas so you only have to pay accountants and lawyers to tidy up your accounts, taxes and contracts. When you see how much an accountant will charge you to create a complete set of accounts from a box of unsorted receipts in the peak Jan-Mar season, you will lean not to make that mistake again...
In any event, how is this "open source"? Template forms do not really have a "source", they are not programs. You mean "free", as in "I don't want to pay for them".
I realize that I may incite a religious war between the TaxCut camp and the TurboTax camp, but using a $75 piece of professional software seems like a good investment. Either would probably do, though I've used TaxCut for most of a decade for my LLC, and it walks you through the business filings pretty decently.
I'll presume that you chose an S-Corp for a reason, and won't badger you about using an LLC for a two-man shop. I will strongly recommend that you go over to irs.gov and read up on the S-Corp rules. There are a bunch of very helpful publications, and the IRS has gotten much more customer-oriented over the years.
If you didn't have a good accountant help you set up the company, you should hire one pronto. If you're just now searching around for free software because you haven't been keeping appropriate accounting records, you're going to have some really late nights before tax time. There's a reason everyone uses Quickbooks -- it's cheap and it works. We just sent our QB files over to our accountant and he filled out a return for us. You also need to set up your ledger. This is much less about software than it is about legal requirements, accounting, taxes, and deadlines. The integrations that nearly everyone does for Quickbooks ($200 or free online), from payroll to shopping carts, make it almost a no-brainer. But it's not free. I ran a small business for four years. Accounting, billing, and record-keeping was a big pain in the rear. I'm a tech who likes to do tech things and solve problems. After four years of hiring, firing, paying, billing, filing, etc. I went back to being a regular employee at a big company. I even have health insurance now. And remember, all that accounting is not billable to your clients. (I also had a 15% discount to anyone who paid fast.) Seriously, don't mess around trying to figure out every tax rule on your own. Hire a professional. For $500, it's the cheapest way to have some piece of mind in case you get audited, which is far more likely in your status. Even intro to accounting is a two-semester course. If you can't afford it, remember -- most businesses don't make it past their first two years.
I've scoured the web for free/open source legal templates for hiring contractors, issuing W-2s, keeping shareholder minute meetings, etc, but haven't been able to find any decent sources.
Little do you know, you are looking for the "Nolo" series of books at your local library, you know, the library, the place where homeless people go for internet access... Your local library, unless its total ghetto, probably has the entire nolo series available to read and/or borrow.
Nolo has a website with a lot of marketing, yet also some information, at:
http://www.nolo.com/
Your best strategy is to skim thru, maybe even check out, the books that look interesting at the library, then purchase the most recent version from nolo for daily use.
I think, based on your description, you want their book "Legal Forms for Starting & Running a Small Business"
I have absolutely no connection to Nolo other than reading their educational books at the library when I was a kid, convinced me that the profession of lawyer-ing or whatever was not quite as interesting as it appeared on TV.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I think it depends more on how enlightened your state government is. They're the ones you'll have to file most of your taxes through, and the better ones (the ones that want to attract more businesses) have websites that allow you to e-file most of your work. That means the development is funded by taxpayer dollars, and if you can convince them to use open source for all of the standard reasons, so much the better!
There are several business-grade open-source accounting programs that might be of help to you, such as xacc and maybe gnucash and of course all the spreadsheet programs. But when it comes to forms used to submit all that data, you're left with what your state provides and allows.
And along the lines of "it takes money to make money", you're not all that worse off with paying some of these commercial companies to help you fill out forms and paperwork... just remember to translate it in terms of hours saved. I've used nannytaxes.com, and one of the employee tax form things (which are only maybe $6 a pop and include mailing/postage straight to your employees). Also I've used both the web-based TurboTax and the free filetaxes.com service to do some of my personal taxes back in the day, and it turned out that the extra optimizations and stuff they put in the $70 commercial product reduced my taxes for more than that amount compared to the free service. Plus, if there are any mistakes, the service should help cover your (and their) collective asses a tad more.
Also don't forget that money you spend on people to handle your taxes for you is itself tax-deductible.
So really, I'd say focus on petitioning your government tax collectors on using sane, web-based, open-standards, open-source software to run their end of the deal, and feel free to spend a pittance on whatever guaranteed commercial software gives you a financial edge on actually calculating and paying your taxes.
I am a lawyer and I know one set of books very well. The Accountant has a whole other set of books that he knows very well. I once did a bankruptcy for someone. He had 90k/yr in income and made another 90k/year in consulting. He did his own taxes for a few years, the IRS disagreed, and his biggest item on the petition was the IRS debt. They can take a while to catch up to you, but when they do..... Pay the Accountant, this is not something you can "just do with a form". The Attorney version of this is "I'll do all the running around, can you just give me the forms"
I'm curious, what advice would you give an accountant who wanted to write their own accounting software or set up their own network? Perhaps that they should hire a computer engineer? So why would you think it's a good idea to do this yourself?
I set up a small software company 8 years ago and I'm still going strong despite the recession - no small thanks to my accountant who saved me £30,000 on last years tax bill by knowing his job. That's what you pay for, specialist advice, and it's presumably what your customers pay you for rather than doing a hack job themselves.
Trust me, this is somethiing you want to outsource. The time you save banging your head against some obscrue government regulation is time you can bill other customers.
I'm sure you find it a priority, since you could then utilize all the homework others have done. Since it hasn't happened, it's clearly NOT a priority.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Incorporating a tiny, tiny, business has far fewer advantages than most entrepreneurs think, and, as you are finding out, imposes a large pile of PITA paperwork burdens. A cookie-cutter S-corp with only you and your wife as shareholders is not likely to provide much protection from legal liability, which is why most people incorporate to begin with. The courts could quite possibly see that the corporation is merely a layer of paperwork on top of your own personal assets. In any case, the legal fees fighting that issue in an attempt to protect your personal assets could easily bankrupt you, personally.
Yes, it is possible to build an S-corp that provides a proper layer of abstraction between you/your wife, and your corporation, but the time to do all that would have been when the corporation was set up, not now. When the S-corp is set up, and maintained, in a sloppy manner, the courts find it far easier to pierce the corporate veil.
Take the money you would otherwise have dumped into legal bills, and spend it on a decent liability policy instead.
SirWired
I've had my business for about nine years - and we do lots and lots of IT management & consulting.
Regardless of how small your business is you need to hire a competent accountant. Free forms are no substitute for education and experience in this field, and you can seriously screw yourself over (legally *or* financially) if you don't know what you're doing. I use the services of a contracted attorney, a contracted general business accountant, a contracted bookkeeper and a contracted federal tax accountant. And I've only got three people on our full time payroll.
Relying solely on free forms is similar to saying, "This free Linux CD will handle all of my company's data processing, storage, management, security & protection needs by itself. We won't need any IT staff at all!"
``It seems like this should be a priority of the open source community since reducing the cost of entry into small business could drive open source development.``
translation:
``It seem to me that the open source community should develop these tools so I don`t have to spend money on any of the other day-to-day costs of running a business.``
Your accountant already has software to deal with the 300 pages of cruft you need to generate quarterlies and yearlies. You don't want to waste time you could be spending building your business on learning tax law which will be half-irrelevant next year when the laws are again changed. You should familiarize yourself with a business tax form, just so you know how to categorize your expenses, this keeps your accountant hours down and saves you from a barrage of e-mails when your trying to get actual work done.
Another option for W-2's is to use a payroll service. Something like ProPayroll is $600 a year + $2 per check. That's a little more expensive than just having your accountant deal with it as part of your other taxes, but it's more time efficient. You just plug in the relevant numbers on a website at each payroll period.
For meeting minutes, use paper. This is a small business, you and your wife probably talk about the business all the time. The board meetings are just a time to get the big picture down on paper. Paper works is great for this task. Just put it in a binder labeled "meeting notes". This binder will also accept "meeting notes" from whenever you change your banking relationship and they need some specific language in your meeting minutes.
I would look into MyTechnologyLawyer.com. The guy that owns the business, Scott Draughon knows his stuff. I have personally purchased his inexpensive legal docs and also the company I work for has used him for more than 3 years.
"It seems like this should be a priority of the open source community..."
The priority of the open-source community has, generally speaking, never been nor will ever be business. Once you learn that, you learn everything you need to know about open-source, and why it does it's job so damn well. The priority of open-source is "source" that is "open". End of.
And what you're asking is basically for legally-binding forms, documents and contracts. That's not something that "open-source" (or more accurately in that case "open-content") has ever really even attempted to produce because it's such a legal minefield that it would be pointless - nobody would use it and those that did would be getting themselves into trouble the second they used them. There's a reason that all big companies have a legal department, and a reason that even "standard" forms for many things (like renting houses, employing people, writing a will) etc. are looked down upon - because legally speaking you have to know *exactly* what you're doing, customise each and every line and constantly update it and that's a lot of time and money - the vital difference being if your Apache crashes, so what? If you end up in jail because your tax form had the wrong thing in the wrong box and you ended up mis-declaring, or your employment contract contained a clause that was illegal in your state rendering the contract void, that's much more of an issue.
Don't look for this stuff. That's my advice. I ran my own small business - I did all my tax forms on tax-office-supplied paper forms and, later, their own official secure website. I worked the numbers out on computer, sure, but that was nothing more than a spreadsheet and knowing what I was doing. I would never have drawn up my own contracts without professional legal assistance. This is the part of a business where 99.9% of the cost is in support, not content - that's why people hire accountants and lawyers rather than do those jobs themselves. If you're struggling to do it yourself, sink your money into an accountant / lawyer. If you can't afford that, your business really isn't big enough to require them, or anything past what you can do yourself, and spending time looking for software and pre-fab documents would be better spent on selling stuff.
Open Office available at openoffice.org is a great open source suite of tools for professionals in any and all-fields. They have a number of business and other templates available on their website...
I know you want "free" resources, but IMO having legalzoom monitor all of this for you is easily worth the ~$100/yr you pay them for it, they alert you of all compliance deadlines for S/C/whatever corporations year round, tell you when to file your taxes, provide templates, guidelines and contracts for contracting, shareholders, act as the registered agent and respond to any state or federal inquiries immediately, giving you your own time to come up with a response... There are many more benefits to it, and I'm sorry if I sound like a fanboy but from my perspective I just paid them to take care of this and it was really worth it to never have to think about it and just follow the instructions on their website. That is kind of the point, instead of paying a lawyer x-thousand dollars to do this, they come up with professionally prepared, general resources similar to what you would get if you hired a lawyer, and make them available at a reduced price.
IANAL, but I am a JD working on a big project which aims to "open source" certain types of legal analysis. Your county has a law library, which will have both print sample forms and access to Lexis or Westlaw, where you can find example documents for most contractual situations. The law librarian there will help you look as long as you are friendly, polite, and don't ask them any legal questions whatsoever (people walk in every day looking for free legal advice, which for ethical and liability reasons they are unable to provide).
Keep in mind that in the same way open source software often requires customization to meet your unique needs, so too will whatever boilerplate documents you find. The nolo publications (mentioned above) can help.
A better idea would be to contact your local small business administration, nonprofic economic development incubator, or local business & law schools with clinical programs and pay a tiny fraction (if anything at all) to have better documents written expressly for you.
Seriously, filling in the form is only a tiny fraction of the amount of work that is required to actually calculate the numbers that go on the forms. You need real accounting and payroll software, or a service (ADP, Paycheck, and so on) to do it for you. Creating a W2 template would be a waste of effort.
1. Contact the nearest Law school and ask legal aid clinic students to work with use as a free term project.
2. Go to the nearest Business School and find Tax accounting senior students to work with you for their thesis.
3. Get the help from retired lawyers as probono (free) to work with you and give them computer help free in return.
4. Get the schedule C and for each line create a spread sheet and transfer the info to the C Schedule.
5. Unless you make a ton of money, probono accountants can verify your IRS submission and give them some free help in return.
6. Donel
You aren't in the business of doing taxes. You're in the business of providing services to other small businesses. Focus on what you are good on and absorb the cost of taxes as a business expense. Whatever you get setup this year is going to be out of date next year. On top of that, the tax code is always changing so even if you do create a decent foundation, you're going to have to constantly keep it up to date. Preparing taxes is a profession in and of itself. Just as your clients aren't web developers, you aren't a tax professional.
when I ran a business in 1995 to 1997 and 1999 to 2000, I could have used free and open source business documents and software.
Every job I had a manager would say "you nerds don't understand business" when we wrote programs for them, as to calling us programmers as nerds. I went for computer science and information systems college courses and then later went for business management and e-commerce courses so I could learn how to make those documents, do accounting and finances, etc.
I at one time worked for lawyers and wrote a program that filled out legal documents like you describe from their templates. I never kept any of their files nor templates and I wouldn't do things as they did.
But I do have an interest in developing open source business applications and automatically filling out forms via office templates and documents, but I would use OpenOffice.Org as well as MS-Office templates and documents.
Here is the OpenOffice.Org Templates website and I am sure you can search for some of them. OpenOfficeUSA.COM has more of them here and you can Google for "Legal Templates" or "Open Source Legal Documents" and see what comes up by varying your terms to narrow it down.
Yes there is Open Source tax Software and A Classic Slashdot story on Open Source tax software in case you missed it.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Doesn't anyone use the government websites anymore? Because here in Canada, all the forms and brief descriptions are online and available for anyone to download? It must be the same/similar in the United States of America.
Also, if the forms and descriptions and small business online help pages provided by the government is not enough... then they have toll free national numbers you call and speak to someone for more clarification. They have numbers on various filing topics including both Provincial (in the United States of America, they refer to a Province as a State) and National.
Also, there are free sessions you can go to in person. If they don't explain in the presentation, then you can ask them (tax/form officials) questions directly afterwards.
Also, there are various community based small business clubs that meet regularly. At least here in the greatness of Canada there are.
Opinion: Unless you plan on voting in an open-source government party (if one runs in your riding)... then I don't think open-source documents are what you need to do what you want.
Fact: The government derives their living from people/businesses just like you doing just what you want to do. IT IS IN THE GOVERNMENTS INTEREST to get you to fill out said forms and file them with accompanying cheque. You see, this is how the government makes money to pay them Chinese the interest on your countries debt.
So... if you take the time to look at the gov websites... I think you will find all you need.
If all of this is not enough to assist you... then get a book on your topic of interest and make sure it was published/updated within the tax year in question.
even there you best you will get is some wild guesses as to what is generally held to be legal and enough "buzzwords" to speak to your own lawyer without making a fool of yourself.
No lawyer worth his bartab is going to say "this is what the law says" unless they are a local lawyer and you have some sort of payment arranged. (yeah you may be able to get some help buying one of the paras a beer but just remember 2 things
1 You have lost points just getting to the courtroom
2 the man that is his own lawyer has a d4ed fool for a client)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Hire your consultants on a 1099 or Corp-to-Corp basis and avoid of hassle of W-2 filings. For your wife and yourself you will have to check the tax implications if you are actual employees or partners of the firm. You should have hired a professional to advise you on these things ahead of time to make sure the corporate structure is optimal.
"Personally, I think it's shameful that we have a legal system that the common man can't use without professional help."
I feel the same way about the medical profession. Here's to DIY home lobotomy kits.
There's a lot of open source business software here:
Open Sky Business Software Directory
http://www.openskyit.com
A few people have said it already, but I'd like to reiterate:
Don't expect software to be able to do this for you. Tax laws change every year, both federal and state. Requirements for corporate filings change every year. Payroll requirements change every year (withholding amounts for FICA, FUTA, unemployment, health insurance requirements, etc).
I have an S-corp, but I don't do any of this myself.
I have a payroll service that costs $50 or so per month. For that cost, they do direct deposit, tax withholding, and also file quarterly 941 forms and prepare W-2s at the end of the year. All deductions are calculated by them, and their guarantee is that if they make a mistake, they take liability for it - ie, they'll pay any penalties or interest that arise as a result.
I have a lawyer who charges less than $200/year to prepare corporate filings. Additionally, they provide me with a list of changes to corporate laws over the course of the year. They highlight anything that may be important for me as a small business owner.
I have a CPA who prepares the corporate tax return. I do the day-to-day accounting (I happen to have Peachtree for Windows, I couldn't find anything open source or Linux based in 2000 when I started this business), but the CPA checks things over and prepares the corporate return and shareholder K-1 forms. This costs about $1000/year.
Overall, I pay roughly $2000/year for all of these services. I think this is well worth it, since I not only don't have to spend the time actually doing this work, but I also don't have to spend the time learning how I need to do it differently every year. I also get some measure of effective insurance, at least with the payroll company, since they are responsible for any mistakes they might make (they haven't made any yet).
I note that most of the question was really directed at legal questions. You can certainly get boilerplate contracts from several places. You may want to find a local lawyer and have them write you one. Get a confidentiality agreement, a subcontractor agreement, and a contract for services (that you provide). Once you have those, you can essentially reuse them for future contracts. There aren't a lot of requirements for meeting minutes (though one thing you should watch out for is that you are required to send a notice of shareholder meetings some 30 days before they're scheduled, or you need to have a "waiver of notice" form signed by all the shareholders. Of course this may not be true in your state) - just a list of people present, a very simple list of topics covered (summaries of the conversation are good, but are not necessary), and the dated signatures of the corporate secretary and president, who in my state can't be the same person.
The bottom line is that there is a lot of expertise needed to do these things right and keep up with all the annual changes. The cost of hiring experts is not that high, so it should be pretty close to a no-brainer.
- Steve
- The Sigless Wonder
I've picked up several Nolo Press books over the years and have found them quite useful. Think of it as a tier one legal source that can help you navigate the convoluted in and outs of the legal profession.
For some things you may still need a lawyer that can review what you have and make suggestions as to whether it is legal in the state you are in. Since the lawyer would be reviewing the documents and not writing them, you could probably save billable hours.
A big LOL @ 'offtopic'
Guy wants open sores business tools /. response is "omgZ roflrofl stupid l0ser we haf teh 200 leenux distros and 500 desktop environments - use one of them".
"but that doesn't help"
"rofl omgzomgZ using proprietary software is evil! Anyways you should not be in business as business is evil, you should write some open sores software then when a big vendor sells it you might get hired by them and it will be soooo teh awesome to have a job!"
the entry barriers into business are getting ever higher though, i certainly agree with that.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Another backwards business.
Hint: hire great people first. Then let them build their toolbox.
One accountant might choose different systems than another. You shouldn't line out the system before you hire the expert.
A really good developer may choose emacs or vi over VS or Eclipse.
A good legal adviser may choose OpenOffice.org over LegalPlanning3000.
You accountant may like Quickbooks, or Sage, or GnuCash, or xTuple.
Those choices might even be different for the same expert, but different business segment. Constuction contractors like different business systems than Telcos.
is there some reason you used an s corp? why not a pass through LLC? no need for minutes, etc, much simpler administration.
Lot's of open sores software up there!
1. Your first mistake was that you probably really wanted to set up an LLC. 2. Hire someone else to do it. Seriously. You might be a superintelligent shade of the color blue, but you're no match for someone who does this professionally. A good business accountant will make you even more money by finding all the writeoffs you're too much of a wimp to claim. I run all of my books through Quickbooks through the year and then pay $180 at the end of the year for a CPA to go through it. I also pay a payroll service throughout the year to process payroll separately from the year end accounting. It's worth every penny.
----- obSig
If you haven't been making quarterly payments to the IRS, you're in for a world of hurt when they process your return.
The Federal Small Business Administration website has lots of really useful information. You should also cruise over to your state government's websites. Many states have useful information for entrepreneurs.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
NoLo have several books that are marginally useful for this; "Legal Forms for Starting & Running a Small Business is staring at me from the shelf across the office. They were helpful for us in our 6-months to a year, but that is about it. (You grow out of that kind of stuff pretty quickly.)
The most cost-effective way we have found to deal with this stuff (if your time is worth anything) is to out-source it. Send your W2s and 1099's through ADP and the like. Small regional banks will often give you deals in doing payroll through them-- it really goes to the big guys for processing. Or, have an accountant do it. Big leap of faith for a bunch of Type-A's like ourselves, but a hell of a lot easier than doing it yourself (and safer).
One of the biggest hassles for us was actually developing our document templates, but we found someone who would do it for us on a contract basis and make it fairly pain-free.
We haven't made the jump yet to an outsourced HR department, but there are a number of things that really get tricky over time. Just today the question was if you pay part-time employees for holidays. We wasted about $3k paying people we didn't need to this year.
I spent a great deal of time looking for good web based, open-source accounting software, but found absolutely nothing that comes close to Quickbooks.
Right now, I'm using SQL Ledger, which is more-or-less OK, but the UI is firmly rooted in about 1990 and printing (especially checks) is really lacking. And while Quickbooks might run udner Wine, I'm really looking for something web-based so I can enter billing information and look stuff up from "wherever", instead of waiting to get back to the office.
Quickbooks Online might be an option, although for some reason, they support Firefox, but not on Linux (User agent switcher seems to make it work just fine).
As much as I hate paying for something every month, and don't really trust Intuit with my data, they're pretty much the only reasonable choice right now for a small business.
I've had my own (successful) business for the better part of a decade. Every so often, I get frustrated with my software, yell, jump up and down, and swear that I'm going to find an OSS replacement. Inevitably, I spend a few days researching and, in the few cases when I find something, trying insufferably terrible software that makes my proprietary stuff look like the best thing ever written.
There is no good open source software for small business. The sooner you realize it and quit wasting time (like me) looking for something that doesn't exist, the sooner you can get back to working on your business. Spend the few hundreds bucks a year for Quickbooks and use an accountant. You'll save a lot of time (money) searching for software that simply doesn't exist.
I don't respond to AC's.
You are a SubChapter S corp which means you're in the USA. In 2007, congress passed a new law whereby if you miss your filing date and you're a corp, you will be penalized $85+/per month/per shareholder until those returns are filed.....even if you did not have any sales/revenue, you still must file your return on time or be subject to these penalties. Ask me how I know.
PALO - Plan, Analyse, Report Screenshots http://www.jedox.com/en/home/overview.html
The best FOSS tool you can get for this is Open Office and templates you build or purchase for it. Taxation ERP is the most boring job in IT and you won't find FOSS programmers doing it for the love. And it's not about forms or templates anyway, its about writing the right numbers in the right places, and for that you need a professional, no matter how small your business is. Hire or contract one. All else quickly becomes a waste of time and money.
If I every go back to being a freelancer, that's the very first thing I'd change. I did all the accounting and tax stuff myself and it was hell. Ok, so this is Germany - the big, dark, evil and twisted Empire of tax laws - but never the less, your job is doing IT and not figuring out US tax law. That independant accountant down the street is much better and more effective at that than you.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I saw these people at a Linux Expo earlier this year.
http://www.xtuple.com/
Most of the packages are open source. They provide customization services and some specialized tools, as well as support (sort of the original Cygnus business model).
IBM and the World Bank's IFC released the SME toolkit a few years ago.
I think it has much of what you're looking for.
On my phone so here's the mobile link: http://m.smetoolkit.org/smetoolkit/en
In the Netherlands the taxes are collected by the "belastingdienst" and they are required by law to accept any form of digital bookkeeping - whether it be an FOSS MySQL dump or a multimillion dollar SAP export or a simple MS Excel/OOo Calc file.
Shouldn't the state provide such things? I mean, they are the ones requiring people to pay taxes and do the bookkeeping. No wonder people are not following the tax systems 100% if the state fails to provide templates, instructions, bookkeeping software etc... They should make it - easy - to pay taxes. Paying taxes shouldn't be a separate job in itself.
I've had great success over the years starting with a free form or template and then running by a professional lawyer or accountant for revisions. I'll happily pay them for one hour of their time rather than get billed for all the time they have their paralegal or whomever typing it up and putting sticky-notes on photocopies. Professional rates for professional insight is a good value. $60/hr for clerical, not so much
"... don't really trust Intuit with my data, ..."
My impression of Intuit is that they are one of the most abusive big companies in the United States.
Here are just a few examples: Intuit abuses.
Here are a few Intuit abuses.
Go with the decent version of QuickBooks 97 (i.e., before they went very evil). It works under the latest versions of Wine. Except for printing. (Grr.) Okay... printing might be important!