Small business owners should be taking advantage of all the free services offered to help them grow their business without impacting their expenditures. I use many of these free services myself at www.johnlizotte.com, and I’m always surprised at how many business owners aren’t aware of just how much they can accomplish for their business, absolutely free! Useful free services that you can use include things like email, expense tracking, invoicing, mobile contact management, and more. I’ve decided to do a series of articles detailing some of these services and how they can help you grow your business without costing you a cent!
One thing most of us hate to do is accounting. No offense to all of the accountants out there. The first in the series is featuring free online accounting from Outright.com. I use this service myself to track my writing income and expenses, and I love it. You can see my online business profile there at: http://entrepreneurs.outright.com/john-lizotte. I’d recommend it to any small business owner who isn’t comfortable managing their own numbers. Outright has plenty of great features, and I’ll talk about a few of them here, but I strongly encourage you to check it out for yourself.
Their website explains how they came into being:
“Backed by leading investors, Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Shasta Ventures, SoftTech VC, and Felicis Ventures, Outright is streamlining the work involved with owning a business, helping entrepreneurs pay the right taxes, record financial transactions, and keep their businesses on track and growing.
Outright was created after watching entrepreneurs struggle to capture all of their business deductions, often piecing together different solutions. Whether sticking every possible receipt in a file folder and shipping it off to a bookkeeper, tracking everything in a huge spreadsheet, or even using a couple of different web sites to track transactions and create invoices, the results were invariably the same: too much time and effort spent on the least enjoyable part of running one’s own business. Our goal: to keep it as simple as possible; helping entrepreneurs track all of their income and expenses to get their taxes done accurately.
And yes, it works on a Mac.”
The management team at Outright is also very impressive! Co-Founder Kevin Reeth has spent more than 15 years bringing software applications and services for Intuit, Yahoo! and eGroups. With Intuit, Kevin launched numerous small business products, including versions of Quicken, rental property software, and the JumpUp community for entrepreneurs. Co-Founder Ben Curren has spent the last 12 years developing web and desktop applications for both small and large corporations, including several years in Intuit’s QuickBooks Group. He specializes in using technology to solve real world problems by creating easy-to-use solutions. VP of Marketing Paul O’Brien brings 15 years of marketing and sales to Outright, including experience as former head of interactive marketing for Hewlett Packard’s direct-to-consumer business and 5 years with Yahoo!’s Advertising Solutions group. Most recently, Paul was VP of Marketing with local search engine Zvents where he was profiled in the Michael Miller book, Online Marketing Heroes. Ryan Thompson, Business Development, joins us with 10 years of business development, corporate strategy and finance management experience across Intel and Intuit. While at Intuit, Ryan managed the acquisition of MyCorporation.com, then became a leader of TurboTax’s New Business Initiatives. In 2008, Ryan founded FileLater, an IRS e-file provider for filing tax extensions and estimated taxes for small business customers.
Now, why is this good news for small business owners? It’s simple, really. Look at the key players in the preceding paragraph. These guys know what they’re doing. They’ve made it incredibly simple to use, and their online support is outstanding.
For the end-user, there are several key features that make this service worth checking into. First, it’s absolutely free. Yes, there are a few add-ons that you can pay for if you choose to, like having Outright prepare 1099′s for your subcontractors. But let’s stick to the free features here. First, the interface. It’s very clean and simple. You enter income or expenses (it will also track your mileage for deductions) in the familiar spreadsheet-like format. You can assign existing categories to income or expense, or you can create your own.
Once you’ve entered any of your transactions, the homepage or “dashboard” displays a sliding chart of recent profit or loss, letting you see your current trends at a glance. And it displays your profit or loss for the year-to-date. From the dashboard you can enter expenses or income, view reports that are sortable by vendor, category, date, etc. One bonus here is that all of the information is exportable right into Excel. There’s also a tax calendar displayed on the dashboard. It alerts you to upcoming filing dates for your business taxes, including quarterly estimated income taxes.
There are three features that any small business owner is going to absolutely love. First, Outright will allow you to automatically import your transactions from eBay, Etsy, Freshbooks, PayPal, and numerous other sites, not to mention the growing list of banks and credit cards. And when April 15 rolls around, if you’ve kept your transactions up to date, Outright will prepare a Schedule C (Profit or Loss From a Business) for you based on your numbers. It’s displayable on screen, or you can download it as a pdf file and print it out to include with your taxes. The third feature is the “Community” button. It’s a discussion board in a question/answer format. The interaction and networking is great, and if you have an accounting, tax, or operational question, you can post it and get answers from other small business professionals! They even have a private email system within the site if you need to contact other members there.
Outright serves a very useful purpose for anyone who doesn’t wan’t to do their accounting manually. If you trade on eBay or Etsy, take payments through PayPal, or are any self-employed professional, you need to check it out. It’s perfect for writers, web designers, auction sellers, craft sellers, tax preparers, and more.
And it’s free…
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