Best Open Source Business Tools? 164
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?
Re:Wine (Score:5, Informative)
Most of what he's talking about sounds like things there are already existing PDF forms for at IRS.gov.
File W2's electronically (Score:5, Informative)
Pay for it (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 [paycycle.com] and SurePayroll [surepayroll.com].)
Nolo books at the library (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [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.
Re:I'm not sure there are any Free templates... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:State governments (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:hire an accountant now (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Nolo books at the library (Score:3, Informative)
This is good advice, and the following is not intended as a criticism.
Then, (directed at the original poster) just before you end up with the inevitable brain aneurysm brought on from trying to learn the legal AND tax codes at the federal AND state levels and get all caught up with your paperwork in a few short months, you can hire professionals anyway, but at least you'll know just enough to understand what the hell they are talking about.
Seriously, I've heard very good things about the Nolo series, but the time to read them was before you started your business. Not now. You need to read the "running" part so you can quickly go back and reconstruct all the financial statements in a way that your lawyer and accountant can understand, that will save you massive gobs of billable hours. I had a part-time job for years with an accountant just tallying up and balancing checkbooks for clients, which was mind-crushingly boring but which paid well (probably because it WAS mind-crushingly boring and the business owners decided they'd rather pay my boss an incredible hourly fee to do it). Or you can get one of the better small business packages for a couple hundred bucks and solve most of the housekeeping/paperwork problems that way.
In the end, I think you'll really, REALLY want to get some professionals involved. The lawyer can talk about S-Corp versus LLC and other fun facts to know and tell, and the accountant can save you from massive penalties for not carrying the "3" properly on the form you filled out in error.
Re:Wine (Score:2, Informative)
The SSA web site allows for direct submission of W2 and W3 AND generates the required W2 PDFs for the employees.
Other tax forms-- For all other forms I use both the irs.gov and the state tax department web site. You may also enroll in EFTPS for direct deposit of Federal taxes (it may be required btw).
Contracts, etc-- get a legal forms book if you don't want to google around. When I began my business, I used one of the Nolo books. It was cheap, provided a good overview of business requirements, and typically the forms only required minor changes. Since then, I've using mostly the irs and the state department of taxation. Also, sign up for their newsletters, so you know when things change.
Re:Divergent Interests (Score:2, Informative)
If it isn't legal advice, then you want to go look to contract and sale of goods laws. The law surrounding warranty would likely apply, though many warranties may be disclaimed. As far as I know, there are no particular laws for complex versus simple products. There are default warranties such as the implied warranty that a good is capable of performing its particular purpose (this warranty can be disclaimed by the seller though). Product liability and warranty disclaimer is a tricky bit of law, hence the 15 million pages of disclaimers we get when we purchase something, which we are all assumed to have read.