Picking A Small Business Accounting Program

by: Stephen L. Nelson, CPA
A small business accounting program should accomplish three tasks: track income and expenses, generate business forms, and keep detailed records for other assets and liabilities.
Tracking Income and Expenses
The task of tracking a business’s income and expense is really the most important job of an accounting system. If you own or manage a small business, obviously, you need some tool for measuring your income and your cash flow.
Although checkbook programs like Quicken and Microsoft Money does little more than keep a checkbook, you can actually keep financial records for a business right out of a checkbook. To do this, you simply categorize deposits as falling into some income category. And when you write a check or make some other withdrawal, you categorize expenses as falling into some expense category.
One problem with using a checkbook program, however, is that by using a checkbook program, you are implicitly using cash-basis accounting to track your income and expenses. Cash-basis accounting counts income when you receive a deposit and counts expense when you write a check.
Cash-basis accounting is easy to understand, and that means you are less likely to make errors in implementing it. However, cash-basis accounting is generally too imprecise for more complicated businesses. If you use inventory in your business, for example, cash-basis accounting isn’t very accurate—and the Internal Revenue Service does not allow it.
And there are other circumstances, too, in which cash-basis accounting produces serious and usually unacceptable errors in precision. For example, if you often receive money before you have actually earned it or if you often incur expenses long before you actually have to pay for them, you need to use a more sophisticated accounting program than a checkbook program.
Generating Business Forms
The second task that a small business accounting program should help you with is the generation of business forms. The most common business form is simply a check. Any checkbook program help you do this. Other business forms that small businesses commonly need to produce include invoices, credit memos, monthly statements, purchase orders, and so forth.
If you have a small business with very simple form requirements—perhaps you need only checks—then a checkbook program may work very well for you.
However, if you have extensive or complicated business form generation requirements, a more full-featured small business accounting package, such as Intuit’s QuickBooks, Peachtree’s Complete Accounting, or Microsoft Small Business Accounting will do a better job for you.
If you produce more complicated forms, but you produce these other forms with a word processing program, then a checkbook program may still work for you.
Detailed Record Keeping for Other Assets and Liabilities
The third task that a small business accounting program should help you with is detailed record keeping of your most important assets and liabilities. A checkbook program lets you keep good detailed records of cash, and for some businesses that is the principal asset. But many small businesses have other significant assets and liabilities they need to track, for example, accounts receivables, inventory, and vendor payables.
Whether or not a particular software program’s accounting tools provide adequate asset and liability record keeping depends on the situation. However, no small business accounting program does everything you need it to do. Any accounting program that provides an extensive list of features, by its very nature, becomes a challenge to use. For example, moving to the accrual basis of accounting adds an entire layer of complexity to financial record keeping, and keeping detailed records of inventory adds another layer.
For these reasons, even when a particular program doesn’t do everything you need it to do, your best choice still may be to use the program—and then simply live with its shortcomings.

What are the benefits of blogging for small business?

by: Kelly ONeil
Copyright 2005 UpLevel StrategiesBlogging has become quite popular for small businesses as of late. I have noticed on PR Leads that there are several story requests for experts to talk about the benefits of blogging for small businesses. So, I decided I better do my homework and see what this is all about. It turns out that there are several benefits to blogging for small businesses. Here are the most important ones:1. Blogging Software is Super Easy to Use: Simply write your thoughts, link to resources, and publish to your blog, all at the push of a few buttons. I use the software blogger.com. It took me 2 minutes to set up my account and 3 minutes to publish my first blog. Check out my blog at: http://uplevelstrategies.blogspot.com/2. Build Relationships Online: Business blogs provide your small business with a chance to share your expertise and knowledge with a larger audience. You have the opportunity to share a piece of yourself with your community allowing them to get to know you better.3. Higher Search Engine Rankings: Search engine marketing is hot. Business bloggers are achieving top search engine rankings because search engines rank based on link popularity and easy to index regular content among other factors. Learning the basic skills of search engine optimization and good content management are keys to better rankings for bloggers.4. Easy Communication: The biggest benefit of Blogging or RSS (see definition below) for your web audience can prove to be a better solution for notification than websites themselves or email. As indicated by Bill Gates in a speech at the Microsoft CEO Summit 2004 in Redmond, Washington: “if you just put information on a Web site, then people don't know to come visit that Web site, and it's very painful to keep visiting somebody's Web site and it never changes. It's very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it… And so, getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail -- that it's too imposing -- and yet the drawbacks of the Web site -- that you don't know if there's something new and interesting there – this [blogs & RSS] is about solving that.”Definitions:RSS - RSS is an acronym for Rich Site Summary, an XML format for distributing news headlines on the Web, also known as syndication. First started by Netscape as part of the My Netscape site, it expanded through Dave Winer and Userland.Blog - Weblog, web log or simply a blog, is a web application which contains periodic posts on a common webpage. These posts are often but not necessarily in reverse chronological order. Such a website would typically be accessible to any Internet user.(c) Kelly O’Neil 2005

Secret Strategies Of The Gurus: Guru 1 - Bill Gates As A Small Business Entrepreneur

: Rick Tanzo
Introduction: Strategies are strategies. Dismiss for a moment from your mind what some people are saying about Bill Gates's offensive practices he used to transform himself from a small business entrepreneur to a titan in the business world. There are yet honest-to-goodness strategies we can glean from his sleeves. We can study, learn from them and possibly apply them in our own home based business. Upon this premise that this article was written. Strategy of Bill Gates - Have a Vision: At the outset, I will lay down the results of my research on one secret strategy of Bill Gates. He used the same strategy to jump-start his small business to today's business behemoth. Based on my research, the strategy of Bill Gates is grounded upon the following: "Have a VISION of what you want to achieveand hold on to that vision come wrath or high water." His vision was:"A Personal Computer on every desk."By the way, I didn't want to use the grammatically correct expression "come hell or high water" - for personal reason - so excuse my grammatical preference. Anyway, let's go back to our subject. When you have a vision, you can make the impossible possible. Almost everybody is familiar about how once upon a time the small business entrepreneur Bill Gates secured mighty IBM's contract to supply the latter's operating system. When he was negotiating with the IBM people, he had no operating system as yet. He was able to buy a Disk Operating System or DOS for $50 thousand. In the end, he got the contract. Why?Bill Gates was guided by his vision - that every desk all over the world should have a computer on it. This vision enabled him to provide IBM with a DOS operating system and have control over it including to whom he wanted it sold to.Beginning Entrepreneur: Before he became an entrepreneur, Bill Gates had nurtured the vision that software will one day rule the world. During high school he spent many late nights with friend Paul Allen tinkering with the school's computer system. He dropped out of college after completing his junior year at Harvard. Instead, he and his bosom friend Paul Allen set up a small business - a software company - in far away New Mexico. This move was in accordance with his vision.His vision became clearer as he moved from a total newbie to one with a small business to keep. His vision was clothed in clearer terms, as he negotiated the DOS deal with IBM.Better late than never: Bill Gates's company ultimately became the leader in the software arena. During the first half of the 1990's - 1993 to be exact - he was among the last of the software titans to acknowledge the future significance of the Internet. But once he did realize that indeed Internet was the wave of the future, he had the tenacity to reshape his vision. His vision retained its old flavor - that is, software dominance in commerce, industry and in every field. It was rehashed in his own words as follows: "In the years ahead, the Internet will have an even more profound effect on the way we work, live and learn … this technology will be one of the key cultural and economic forces of the early 21st century."At this moment in time, Bill Gates is guided by the vision that the Internet is the wave of the present and the foreseeable future.Lessons Learned:You can learn from Bill Gates by having your own vision for your small business. Lay down this vision in your mind. Then put it into writing. Read your vision everyday while at work in your small corner of the house. Your vision could be as short-term as the following:"To make my web site land within the top five of Google when people search for the keywords 'home based business,'" or"$200,000 earning this year from Google Adsense,"or"To enrich the content of my web site using the theme 'scrap book making.'"Do not limit yourself to short-term vision. Aim for the long-term. A five to ten years period would suffice. Technology may change but your vision will essentially be the same. You may refine it if deemed necessary, like incorporating the effect of technological changes - as Bill Gates did. Your Share of the Pie:Everybody - from Bill Gates down to your netpreneur friend - has recognized the tremendous role of the Internet in business developments. Some of the more immediate pressing concerns you should consider at this stage concerning your home based business are the following:- General preference for digital transactions by clients. For example, as a beginning Internet entrepreneur you should meet your clients' demands who favor the use of online payment system. At this juncture, I would like to refer you to my web site at InternetMarketingLearningCenter.com which offers free learning stuff on Internet marketing and home based business. One category being tackled in the web site is the online payment system. You may read online news and keep yourself abreast of the best software companion for your small business.- Choose products that are preferred by people at this time when the Internet is dominating people's lives. It has been determined that information products and web shopping are favored by most consumers. Information products include your very own ebooks and "how-to" manuals.- Make it your aim that your products are cheap, very useful, and the best among the rest of competing products. This applies most especially to shopping products. For your own digital products, you have the advantage of pricing them according to your own estimation. You as the author of your own digital product determines the price level. It is no wonder why gurus like Jay Abraham, Jim Daniels and the late Corey Rudl have become so wealthy from selling their own digital pieces.As for these three, they will be among the titans that we will tackle in future issues of this series.