We are pleased to announce  our new Schedule C report, just in time to help you prepare the IRS Form Schedule C. If you are a sole proprietor, you are required by the IRS to file the IRS Form Schedule C along with your personal taxes (Form 1040). The IRS Form Schedule C reports the profit/loss earned through your business.

How the Report Works
The report displays your account activity according to the IRS Schedule C tax categories that you select for each of your Revenue, Expense, Cost of Sales,Other Income, and Other Expense accounts. Like the Income Statement, the Schedule C tax form reports the profit or loss earned through your business and these are the accounts types that are used to determine profit.

Categorizing Your Accounts
We’ve gone ahead and assigned a Schedule C reporting category for the pre-defined set of accounts in your default Accounts List but you can change them.

Reviewing and Changing Account Categories
The Accounts List export includes a new column named Schedule C Tax Category. By exporting your Accounts List, you will find the name of the IRS Form Schedule C tax line that has been selected for each applicable account.

To view the selected reporting categories for your accounts, simply go to the Account List and click the Export icon.

If, after reviewing your accounts export, you see some you want to change, just go to the Accounts List, hover over the account and click Edit. Then select the category that best fits your account activity from the Schedule C reporting categories menu. If the account is not tax-related, then you can select “None.”

Changes to Your Accounts
Prior to the release of this report, there was a single expense account in our pre-defined set of accounts for recording Travel, Meals and Entertainment expenses.  Because the IRS lets you only deduct 50% of qualifying meals, we have split up the account to match the IRS Form Schedule C.

• If you had not previously made any changes to that account, you will see that it is now a parent account of 2 new accounts: 1) Travel and 2) Meals and Entertainment. To ensure accuracy of the Schedule C report, please use the Meals and Entertainment account to track expenses for meals that qualify for the 50% deduction.
• If you had previously made changes to that account (either by changing the account name, or creating your own child accounts within it) we did not add the new accounts.  To ensure accuracy of the Schedule C report, please make sure to map the account you are using to track expenses that qualify for the 50% deduction is mapped to the Schedule C reporting category Travel, meals, and entertainment: Deductible meals and entertainment.

If you have changed the names of other applicable accounts in our pre-defined set of accounts or added your own, we have assigned the “Other” category to the account per Type. For example, if you changed the expense default account “Advertising” to “Marketing & Advertising” then we selected “Other Expense” as the Schedule C category. Please review these assignments and change them as appropriate.

The Cost of Goods Sold Account
When designing the Schedule C report, we took a look at how we were currently handling cost of goods sold. For Schedule C reporting purposes, WorkingPoint reports cost of goods sold for inventory items through reporting the change of inventory, therefore you do not assign a category to the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) protected account. This means we don’t take the amount recorded in the COGS account and simply add it to the report line. The value for costs associated with inventory is reported by the change in inventory. Because of this, anything you add to the COGS account outside of the intended purpose – tracking COGS from the sales of inventory – will not display in the report. It will still be included on your Income Statement (P&L) but it won’t be included on this report.

To help ensure accuracy of your report, we have limited the use of your COGS account and its availability in the account selector menus. You can still use the cost of goods sold account using the adjusting entry form. But we recommend that you use other cost of sales accounts  to track the costs for non-inventory related stuff like labor or things you just don’t want to track because you don’t store it in inventory. If you use another cost of sales account, it will show as part of your total cost of goods sold on the Schedule C report and your Income Statement.

If you have used the Cost of Goods Sold account for transactions other than the system’s recording of the cost at time of sale or inventory adjustments, we recommend that you use the Move Entries feature to move the entries from the Cost of Goods Sold account to another Cost of Sales account so that your costs will be included in your Schedule C report.

For more information on the Schedule C report, please visit our online Help Center.

The WorkingPoint office will be closed on Monday, February 15, 2010 in observance of President’s Day.

If you need to reach customer support, please email support@workingpoint.com and we will get back to you as soon as possible but most likely Tuesday.

Stephanie Miles of AppVita takes a spin in WorkingPoint. AppVita reviews web apps with a mission of “Discovering web apps that just make life better.” So naturally, they found us!

Whether you’re interested in a tool to help you manage invoices, track expenses, promote your business, or view your real time cash positions, WorkingPoint is an application that offers all of those services and more. Instead of signing up for multiple service-specific accounting tools across the web, WorkingPoint puts all of the tools necessary for small business accounting into one, easy-to-use application that can be accessed from any computer at any time.

Read the Full Review

As I’ve written before, I firmly believe that entrepreneurship requires a basic level of optimism, simply to get up every day, much less to actually be successful. In addition to being optimistic, successful entrepreneurs also need to have a keen ear for the sound of opportunity knocking — and then rush to answer the door.

Because of this, most of the entrepreneurs I’ve met in my life have had a strong natural inclination to over-use the word “Yes!” And while that word is never intended to have a negative impact, the reality is that it is often the gateway to a slippery slope that no one saw coming. Michael Michalowicz, of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, discusses this in his recent post, The Most Dangerous Word In Business.

The scenario that Mike paints is reasonable one, and worth considering. But in my career, I’ve found myself reliving a different version of the same problem. Envision this scenario:

A big client has a new idea they would like to see implemented. They are excited about it, believes it gets them a competitive advantage, and they have absolute confidence in your ability to get it done. The only danger is that, in order for it to do any good, it must be done in a month. Any later than that, and the window of opportunity has closed, and the whole thing has been for naught.

You look at their request, agree that it would be a valuable differentiator for them and agree that it’s entirely doable… but you also see that it’s more complicated than they are assuming, and that a month to get the whole thing turned around is ambitious to the point of being risky. Your gut reaction is, “If only they’d asked me this 2 months ago!”

And then your brain starts to churn… “How could we get this done in time?” “What would we need in order to shorten the timeline?” “Would we be able to split the work across more resources to get it done in that amount of time?” And then the doozy: “If we did X and Y, got help from so-and-so, maybe trimmed back the scope just a tad, and everything went 100% perfectly, I think we could pull it off…”

Danger, Will Robinson!

In my world of web development, this is usually where the wheels start to come off the wagon. The trouble is, the most common response is to try slapping them back on and getting back on the trail at full-speed.

Here are the things to remember when you hear the voices in your head trying to talk your gut into saying “yes.”

Nothing Complex Ever Goes 100% Perfectly
I’m sure there must be some type of work out there somewhere that can be counted on to go quickly. But it’s not anything in my universe. Whether it’s software development, change management, people management, process improvement or marketing campaigns, anytime you are dealing with the marriage of people, systems and processes, you are in a complex Bermuda Triangle of potential risk.

There are tons of things you can do to help manage that risk, mitigate it, buffer it and tap dance around it, but all of those things take time and resources. Underestimating the level of effort involved — or, worse yet, assuming it won’t be necessary at all — is like painting a big red bulls-eye on your project and then tempting fate to start taking pot-shots at your efforts.

Expectation Management is Everything
This one is a hard thing for people to remember, but it’s the truth: under-promising and over-delivering makes you credible, reliable and trust worthy. Over-promising and under-delivering unravels all of that — and destruction is always faster and easier than creation.  In other words: it could take you ages to build credibility, but only one misstep to destroy it. A plan that sounds good heading out of the gate, but falls flat before you hit the finish line does no one any good.

Worse yet, in an effort to accomplish the impossible, we often resort to heroic efforts. While that sound noble, it’s also short-sighted. Consider this: if you have a team that is working 20 hours per day to deliver, and even then can’t get it done in time to save the day, then not only have you burned your credibility with your client, but you’ve also burned out your team. If you are relying on heroic efforts to get things done, then you are setting yourself up for being seen as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

People do not like being told no. But, without fail, they’d rather know bad news early so they can plan for it, than to be led down a garden path with a lot of up-front “yeses!” only to discover they’ve ended up in a thicket of poison oak.

Yes Must be Unanimous
The scenario I’ve seen most in my career with startups is that the person who says “Yes!” to a client request is not the (only) person who is going to be needed in order to get it done. (Just about every single CEO I’ve ever worked for falls into this category.)  Before you tell your client “yes!” make sure that you get a “yes!” from all of the people needed to do the work. And make certain everyone is clear on what it will take.

One of the biggest complaints that developers have with project managers is that they are given top-down directions that include timelines they never agreed were realistic in the first place. This is not an unreasonable complaint. The flip-side of that, though, is that far too often, development teams don’t push back hard enough and actually say, “No, that is not realistic.” Instead, it’s too easy to say, “Ok” in a meeting, and then go back to their desk and grumble about it.

The best solution I’ve found to this problem is multi-step:

1. Instead of saying yes to the client immediately, buy a little bit of research time and tell them you’ll get back to them once you know more.
2. Meet with your team and — before telling them what the client’s deadline is — ask them how much time they believe it would take to do the work.
3. Work through the details with the team a bit, so that everyone is comfortable that you are at least in the same ballpark with what you are expecting to deliver.
4. Once you have a timeline that the team feels confident they can deliver, share the client’s deadline.
5. Assuming the client’s deadline is sooner than the team’s expected delivery date, examine the delta. Are there things that could be trimmed out that would make it realistic to hit the deadline? Don’t try stacking a precarious house of cards in order to get to a qualified yes, but sometimes there are ways to whittle things down enough to make it doable.
6. Step through a risk analysis excercise with the team.
7. Identify multiple potential, realistic options that the entire team is confident in.
8. Present several options to the client. Keeping in mind that not one of those options may be exactly what they originally asked for.

The bottom line: all business is about negotiation, and almost nothing is black and white. Be wary of looking at every request in over-simplified ‘yes/no’ terms. The answer to the client’s original request may truly be, “Oh, hell no!” But your response should (typically) be a set of potential compromises for them to chose from. Instead of ABC, it could be A within the deadline, with BC to follow shortly thereafter. Or it could be XYZ as a short-term fix, while ABC gets done in the background for next time.

Whatever the solution, a knee-jerk “yes” is usually the wrong answer if everyone’s gut is screaming “no!” — for both the reasons that Mike outlines in his post, as well as the reasons I’ve highlighted above.

Absolutely: be optimistic, be sensitive to new opportunities, be confident in your team, and be a valuable resource for your client. Just remember that you can’t do any of those things if aren’t realistic about the committments you make.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas

Tell Your Friends About WorkingPoint, and We’ll Tell Ours About You!

Here’s How You Participate:
Tell your friends about us and you’ll be entered in our new contest!  It only takes 2 minutes. Here’s how simple it is:

1. Log in to your WorkingPoint account and click the “Tell Your Friends About WorkingPoint” button on your home page:
2. Tell your small business friends about WorkingPoint by entering their email addresses and sending them a message recommending it.
3. When your friends click the link at the bottom and sign up for a free account, you will earn a credit for the referral.

And Here’s What You Could Win:
The top 3 WorkingPoint subscribers who earn the most credits by inspiring friends to sign-up will receive a high-value promotion package from WorkingPoint designed to help you promote your business and gain customers, including:

1. Home Page Placement –  The home page is a coveted space on any website and we’ll promote your business on WorkingPoint.com for a whole month!
2. Company Featured on the WorkingPoint Blog – Our blog is read by thousands of readers every day, and we’ll help you reach a new audience by featuring you and your company.
3. Company Featured in the WorkingPoint Newsletter – Our newsletters reach thousands of businesses each month, and we’ll prominently feature your company in a March newsletter.
4. You’ll Earn a Community Builder Badge– Community builders are key members of our community. We’ll single you out from the crowd with our Community Builder badge and feature your business in our Company Directory, an online listing of WorkingPoint Company Profiles.

WorkingPoint will announce the three contest winners at the end of February, and these winners will receive their promotional reward packages during the month of March.

Thanks for helping us spread the word!

I attended a funeral for a member of my extended family this weekend. At the informal gatherings throughout the weekend, we watched a video slide show created by his daughter, which captured key moments and highlights of his life.

Ranging from a childhood photograph of him as a little boy, sitting on a sled holding his (terrified) cat, all the way through his 80th birthday celebration, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, the video was a very sweet tribute to a life that spanned the better part of a century.

You know what was not anywhere in any of the photographic memorial of his life? His job.

I was thinking about this as I was ready Tim Berry’s horrified response to an Entrepreneur.com article entitled, “Love Your Business More than Your Family.” Mr. Berry identifies a few of the most shocking objections he has to Mr. Cloutier’s article, but I have a few others I think are worth adding.

Cloutier says: “By all means, make it an occasion to show your spouse, kids, loved ones that you care. Then get your behind to the office because that’s where you need to be. Your family will still be there when you get home.”

Newsflash: Taking your family for granted is the world’s most sure-fire way of losing them. For starters, any spouse who puts up with being second fiddle indefinitely needs therapy to work on self-esteem issues. To be blunt, if they are less important than your job, then they would be better off without you — no matter how much money you are bringing in.

Secondly, people do not live forever. My mother died at 39 years old. Even worse, she died 28 days after she was diagnosed with leukemia. Even if she had been able to spend that 28 days living (instead of being hooked up to machines in a hospital room), you cannot make up for decades of life in 28 days.

Finally, study after study after study shows that parental involvement is key to raising healthy, stable children to be productive members of society. It’s not the responsibility of one parent, it’s the responsibility of both. If you care about your job more, then not only are you teaching your child a horrible lesson about their own self-worth (not to mention missing out on being a positive influence during their formative years), but you’re also begging for them to find other influences. Nature abhors a vacuum, and this is rarely more vivid than watching children gravitate towards unhealthy influences in the absence of healthy ones.

Cloutier says: “If you are not focused–if family, friends and loved ones fill up your busy weekly schedule–you are probably failing to deliver real profits for your company.”

Newsflash: Your business’ success depends on more than just how much time you spend on it. Working harder but not smarter doesn’t do you any good, and other factors — business partners, market conditions, etc. — can all impact the success of your business, regardless of how much of your time you spend.

This advice is tantamount to a choice: attempt both a business and a life with decent odds of modest success, or scrap the life and roll the dice that the business can be successful enough for you to be able to successful bribe people into pretending to be a part of your life.  Sacrificing a life on the outside chance of ridiculous success and wealth is an awful big gamble.  If the dice don’t roll in your favor, then that leaves you absolutely nothing else to show for your life.

Cloutier says: “They’d much rather enjoy great financial security than see you struggling for the rest of your life to make money that never comes.”

Newsflash: This is the kind of self-deluded justification that someone tells himself while he is waiting to pay bail for his 16-year-old who just got arrested for stealing cars.  Being able to pay for expensive therapists and lawyers does not make you a good parent.

When you die, what are your friends and family going to remember about you? How much money you left them? Maybe, but money doesn’t last and eventually it will be gone. Your kids are going to remember you teaching them to ride a bike or how to fish or about that time it started raining during your camping trip and your sleeping bag got soaked.

Do you honestly think your spouse cares more about getting a nice piece of jewelry than about watching a sunset with you on a remote beach somewhere?  (And, if your spouse does care about the jewelry more, then what was going through your mind when you married them in the first place?)  If your spouse is supposed to be content to be married to a ghost, then what good are you doing them as a spouse?

I watched the video slide show at the funeral this weekend several times. You know what I saw? I saw a man who loved his family. I saw a man with hobbies he enjoyed, and a man who belonged to communities of people with whom he had a connection. The people who were at his funeral talked about his sense of humor and his passion for life. No one once mentioned his business.

Cloutier says: “But in the end, the best thing you can do for them is to create the legacy of a business that is thriving and financially sound. When you’re retired, wealthy, and able to spend Valentine’s Day and other special occasions with your kids and grandkids at your winter home in Hilton Head, you’ll be glad you devoted so much of your time to your first love: your business.”

Newsflash: This is what I find to be the most dangerous advice of all. If you spend your entire life loving your business more than your family, by the time you are sitting in that winter home in Hilton Head, none of your kids or grandkids are going to bother to visit you. (Nor should they.)

Life is hard. Relationships are hard. It is only the most delusional arrogance that truly claims that business is more difficult, and therefore it’s the only thing worth spending time on and worth practicing to get better at doing successfully.

If you spend 60+ years ignoring your life, by the time you put your business aside — and, let’s face it, odds are slim that someone with those priorities ever would — whatever “life” you have waiting for you is likely to be a mess. Like anything else, we only get better at life with practice. If you wait until retirement to even start, then you’re 40+ years behind everyone else.

Everyone in your life will have become so used to living without you, that trying to fit you back in will be a bigger chore than makes sense for most of them to bother with. And, just because you’ve become exceptionally skilled at business, doesn’t mean that you’ve learned how to be good at your role within your family — odds are, if you’ve neglected that role for decades, you are probably pretty lousy at it.

If you do love your business more than anything else, then do everyone a favor and skip having a family at all.  Your business is not your only job.  If you have people in your life, then you have a responsibility to them, too.  And neglecting their emotional needs — which is time-consuming, difficult work — in favor of only meeting their financial needs means that you are not doing your job.

Business people who neglect their families for their business are no more honorable than any other type of spouse or parent who doesn’t live up to their family and social obligations. They just use making money as a justification for their behavior.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, blogger, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade. She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Heather DiCenzo at Holiday Inn Express-Tampa, USF/Busch Gardens:

The Brand New Holiday Inn Express & Suites is adjacent to Busch Gardens / Adventure Island and is the CLOSEST hotel to the University of South Florida and University Community Health Hospital.

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free company profile today!

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Captain Paul West at FantaSea Sailing:

Sailing the Sun Coast of Florida to the Keys, FantaSea Sailing will show it’s clients anchorages, marinas and sailing grounds of SW Florida. Packages are from Boat & Breakfast to multi-day customized sailing adventures. Based in Fort Myers Beach Florida the gateway to the Gulf of Mexico.

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free company profile today!

One of my favorite startup blog authors, Martin Zwilling, has a great article this week about why someone who is an inventor needs to partner with someone who is an entrepreneur in order to turn his invention into an actual business.

This is always a fascinating topic for me, because in my tech universe, I see this all the time. The geeky geniuses who build cool things are rarely the ones who have the business and people skills to get it to market, build an organization around it, and monetize it enough so that everyone can live off of it.

Conversely, oh-so-many entrepreneurs don’t have the stomach for low level details of how a product works, or the nitty gritty trouble-shooting required to get over the hump when you hit a roadblock. These are two groups who need each other in order to get things done. But there is a lot of advice about how, if you’re going to build a tech startup, you better be able to code yourself. I think this is a problem for this precise reason.

Yes, certain things are easier if you can just bang them out yourself. I’ve spent more than a decade as tech project manager, and I can’t count the number of times I wish I had the ability to just jump in and do something myself because I was frustrated with other people’s progress. But part of managing is leading other people through that process, not cutting them off at the pass by doing it yourself.

In all of my time at startups over the past 14 years, I have worked with several hundred developers, of all levels of quality, commitment and disposition. In that time, I’ve only met a small handful who have any entrepreneurial inclinations whatsoever. Like most other parts of the employment world, most of them do not have the appetite for risk, the drive or the compulsion to tackle building a venture.

Of the half dozen or so that I’ve met who have the stomach for entrepreneurship, I’d say that maybe two or three actually have enough business and people savvy to make a real go of it. Developers (and scientists) are often introverts. There is nothing surprising about this, since these professions require the qualities that tend to come very naturally to introverted people: the ability to work alone for long stretches of time, the ability to concentrate enough to shut out the rest of the world and focus, thinking through complex obstacles in depth before slapping things together.

Yet successful entrepreneurs are typically extroverts. Again, this makes sense. Network building, relationship development, sales, partnership cultivation and generally being the public face and voice of a business are part of the job. Those are often the types of things that can often make a staunch introvert queasy.

Martin’s point is correct: these two groups need each other in order to be successful.

So, to those who say that a successful entrepreneur building a tech startup needs to be able to write his own code, I can only say this: yes, in a perfect world, that would be possible. But a passionate entrepreneur with a viable idea to take to market should never give up his dream, just because he’s not a developer.

It may take longer to get there without being able to do it yourself, but a race car driver has a mechanic for a reason. They are different skill sets, different dispositions and different roles designed to fill different needs. It’s therefore not unreasonable to expect that it should simply be a different person.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, blogger, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade. She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

In all the talk about social media, conversations typically revolved first and foremost around Facebook and Twitter. Secondarily, LinkedIn will come up for professional reasons, along with bookmarking sites, YouTube and Flickr. Once you get past the top handful, though, the list becomes very fragmented.

This presents an interesting opportunity for the crafty entrepreneur, though.  Because, while everyone else is paddling around these crowded social ponds, opportunities abound in smaller, specialized social networks that center around a more precise focus.

Niche social networks can have a lot of great value when it comes to building connections with both potential customers and with potential partners.

SmallBizBee published a great list this week: 40 Social Networking Sites Specifically for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, and Startups.

While the list covers some of the more traditional ones (starting with LinkedIn), there are also some very specialized networks on the list, targeting needs that are unique to entrepreneurs:

• PartnerUp
• Qapacity
• Ryze
• FledgeWing
• The Funded
• Cofoundr
• Perfect Business
• E.Factor
• Raise Capital

Whether you are looking for funding, for partners, for customers or for advisors, there are social networks that cover the spectrum. If you think that Twitter is too overwhelming and that Facebook is for kids, then I’d encourage every entrepreneur to read through that list, identify a few that appear applicable, and then go check them out.

Resources for entrepreneurs can be plentiful if you know where to look, but as I’ve said before, finding the right business parter can be harder than finding the right spouse. So no matter what you are looking for when it comes to building your business, the more options, the better your odds of finding what you need.

So don’t limit yourself to the most obvious choices. Branch out and see what other alternatives might just fit the bill.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, blogger, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade. She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.