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?

Comments

Re:Wine

[nametaken]

Most of what he's talking about sounds like things there are already existing PDF forms for at IRS.gov.

File W2's electronically

[xyzzy42]

http://www.ssa.gov/employer/

Pay for it

[Trailer Trash]

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.

Re:Divergent Interests

[Anonymous Coward]

You can disclaim liability over "legal advice" as well as legal document templates. This is the premise by which websites such as www.docstoc.com get away with offering free legal document templates. (They're actually a great source for start-ups.) It's basically just a matter of making it known and understood that you're not an attorney, nor have the templates been altered specifically for your use, and so you should use them at your own discretion and at the advice of your own legal attorney.

As for the various open source software applications you mentioned, I am not sure, but open source *Business* accounting software is basically non-existent.

For our web development startup, Forward Interfaces, we developed our own time-clock web application with which we can track our hours (we're a small operation of 3 company members thus far) and we plan on developing our own quickbooks-style accounting software, project management and CRM suite. We figure, even if there is existing software out there, it's probably not going to be *exactly* what we need - and hey, we're a software development company!

Re:Wine

[Trepidity]

There's lots of web-based stuff too, which is increasingly being offered as a part of a package with other services. Payroll processors are common, for example: they handle paying your employees (check or direct deposit), and as part of the deal withhold payroll taxes and applicable income taxes, send out W-2s to the employees, send the appropriate filings to the IRS, and keep the appropriate records. It's not just the software, but the fact that they also handle things like doing the direct deposit, which otherwise you'd need to set up and keep maintained.

I'm usually a fan of doing things yourself, but for $300-600/yr for a small company for services like those, I would probably just let them handle it, because the fixed costs for dealing with payroll for only a handful of employees are too high.

(I have in mind stuff like Intuit Online Payroll and SurePayroll.)

Nolo books at the library

[vlm]

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.