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

Divergent Interests

[causality]

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.

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.

Re:Divergent Interests

[Ritchie70]

One key to a successful business is, so much as possible, to only do things that contribute to your bottom line.

Guess what? SAP doesn't work the way the way the really big business who use it want either. They change their entire business process to use SAP.

I work for a Fortune 200 company. We sell food.

Decades ago they wrote the accounting software in COBOL. I work with some of the guys who did the work. But now they're implementing Oracle Financials, and they're changing business process as necessary.

Quickbooks or a similar package is probably sufficient for you - even if it doesn't work exactly how you want. You can almost certainly live with it, and unless your business is the sale of accounting software (web-based or otherwise) you have no business writing your own.

There is none

[supervillain]

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.

I will say it and await the flames

[jimicus]

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.

Re:I will say it and await the flames

[Trepidity]

Tax software is hardly simple, though I agree it is on the technical side. Not only is there no "internationally agreed XML schema for the taxman to publish this years' tax legislation", but there is no formal record of this year's tax schema at all. The tax laws are riddled with vaguely worded provisions, some of which (in the US) have been clarified by IRS advisory opinions, tax court precedent, or regular court precedent. You basically need a team of lawyers from every jurisdiction to even figure out what the tax code is. Encoding it in software is the relatively easy part.

Oh, and there are constant updates to it, some of which come out so late that patches ideally should be out 1-2 days after the new regulation is announced. Who is the volunteer who is going to spend their life monitoring the IRS's press releases and patching tax software?

Bad idea

[Shandalar]

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).

Re:Stick to your business

[vlm]

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.

Its possible he had good reasons that didn't make it into the article. No idea what they could possibly be, but ...

The real value of a wiki or form collection website, is building vocabulary and knowledge BEFORE meeting with the pros. It is possible the original poster had never heard of anything but a S-Corp, therefore he walks in saying he's getting an S-Corp, end of story. A glance at a "forms collection" for an LLC vs an S-Corp could have been very educational...

Professional meetings are much more productive when you can evaluate the professionals advice and actions. If you can't, then don't waste time meeting, just hand them barrels of money and hope they do the right thing for you, which is not exactly a recipe for business success.