One of the ways to alleviate costs in a small business is to leverage open source software. Everyone does to a degree, and some do it better than others. For example, our online accounting business uses open source within the application itself as well as mail servers and operating systems. There are plenty of instances that the open source software results in better features than the paid software applications.

There usually is a caveat though with open source. While they are community driven and supported, you have to be able to man the help station yourself and be proactive in finding the solutions to your particular issues. It also could be that your issue is explained in a very technical fashion and you have to be able to at least learn enough to disseminate that information. This makes certain choices more viable than others depending on the small business owner’s comfort level with technical documentation or sometimes lack thereof.

If you feel comfortable in the technical realm to use certain open source tools, there are many to choose from if you only take a few minutes with your favorite browser and look for the subject + open source. It has definitely helped keep our costs lower which is one of the reasons we can pass along the savings to our clientele.

Whether you’re searching for web based accounting or just name searches on things such as Merchant’s Mirror, there is always a need for small businesses to do a patent or trademark search.

Mainly, it’s to make sure that you’re not infringing on someone else’s work and to do your due diligence if you’re seeking to apply at the US Patent and Trademark Office. While filing through a patent attorney is probably not a bad idea, you can do all of the work yourself. Last I saw, I believe a trademark ran about two to three hundred dollars. Patents were a bit different depending on what stage you were in and what you were patenting.

Either way, you still need to make sure that you’re doing the right research. There are several searches online that you can use, and some are better than others, but I would definitely recommend from a preliminary standpoint to first check Google Patents. This is the quick and well-known text search method similar to their usual search engine. Pretty remarkable look. From there, I would go to the USPTO and be definite that you’re not missing anything. While Google makes the effort with updating their databases, there’s nothing that screams finality than going directly to the source.

There are other methods of searching, some are a lot cleaner that allow complex regular expression, but overall, I would recommend at the very least doing the two above. That way, you’re at least covering yourself and making sure that your business won’t be forced to change its name in the future because someone forgot to do the legwork.

Are we really surprised that there has been an increase in self-employment, a percentage that has doubled the numbers from a year prior in the same quarter?

Think about it. With all of the large corporations tightening their belts and getting rid of crucial professionals, there are many more of those that are striking it out on their own their their respective industries as independent firms and consultants than trying to look in the dried up job market. In fact, if you’ve been job hunting for a little bit you would be quick to recognize that there are not as many of the positions there as you’re lead to believe and while those large corporations are actually laying people off, they still have work to do that cannot be done with staff on hand. Thus, consulting and small businesses are still needed by these larger businesses.

If you take that into consideration, then you’ll also realize that while it’s no easy task to go out on your own, it’s also something that is very fulfilling and allows you to learn things about your business that you might not have necessarily knew about before. This gives you insight on how corporate structure works and eventually be able to look at things in a different light. Obviously, going out on your own means that you would need a little business acumen since you’ll be running everything from your own accounting software to marketing and advertising. When you’re self-employed, you will also need to buy what’s right for your company without over-extending your budget. Finding more cost effective solutions such as web based accounting is a definite need in the consultation world. In the end? There will be more people that adapt to owning their own businesses than ever before thanks to how global economics are panning out.

And boy do we need it. Apparently the government calls those businesses that are self-proprietorships, or self-employed as “personal businesses”. And fortunately for people that qualify, there are several things that are going to help just a smidgeon these next two years.

There is the Make Work Pay tax credit which is several hundred dollars, and an accelerated depreciation for certain assets. Neither of which will give you a tremendous boost, but when you must count pennies in this economy, every little bit counts. Obviously you should consult your tax professional before going off and buying a bunch of things or counting on those dollars to come back into your business to make sure that you actually land in the qualification realm.

What this means for us? Well, it just reinforces the fact that there are at least twenty three million personal businesses out there that all need some sort of accounting software. And with what you’d save from the tax credit, isn’t it time to switch over to something that also functions better?

Photo Credit: (spcbrass)

It’s interesting that even those in Redmond are seeing the writing on the wall. Cloud computing is here to stay and this is reinforced by the fact that one of the major league players in the software application development world, Microsoft, is launching an online version of Office 2010.

This move not only justifies where small businesses are going, but it also shows that pretty much everyone is moving towards an cloud driven world where your applications do not exist on your own local machines anymore. Obviously, this still requires you to have an Internet connection of some sort and the move to a cloud based solution is a difficult one still for many to swallow in the development world. But with Microsoft making the leap, it actually shows that almost all of the major software developers are now backing cloud based computing.

One of the significant key moves here is that the company that hosts the cloud now has full control over the versioning. No longer will you have support questions that are determined by older version A, B, or C but instead the questions will start migrating towards actual usability and functionality. This not only creates ease for the support staff, but it also helps the development cycle flow better.

Small businesses benefit from all of this because the cost of doing business on a cloud based system is inherently less than a desktop system. After you have calculated all of the costs associated with data retainment, the answer is simple when it comes to choosing what to use for your small business accounting, office applications, and the rest. This move by Microsoft signifies not only a competitor-driven move towards Google Apps, but the fact that Google Apps is actually making a difference. Welcome to the age of cloud computing.