Bootstrap

Estimated taxes are due Monday, September 15

Ok all you entrepreneurs out there, time to give the government it’s cut of the action.  Third quarter estimated taxes are due this Monday, September 15.  This payment is for earnings through August 31, 2008.  And remember, if you’re self employed or run a business, you need to be paying self employment tax in addition to income tax.  For those who may not be familiar with self-employment taxes, you need to pay 12.4% of the first $102,000 of self employment income into Social Security and 2.9% to Medicare (which has no upper income limit.)

If you use Bootstrap to track your income and expenses, you can get a conservative estimate of what to pay for Federal estimated taxes by clicking on the “Taxes” tab.

Don’t forget to also make your state payments (which vary by state of course, so make sure to look up your requirements.)  We plan to offer help on estimated State taxes in the future, but won’t have it for this tax year.

To learn more about making Federal estimated tax payments, go to http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=110413,00.html 

For those who lost their IRS payment vouchers, you can print them out at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040es.pdf 

Now, if you don’t expect to owe more than $1,000 in taxes for the whole year, then you don’t need to make estimated tax payments.  But we’re hoping everyone out there is making lots of money, which would mean footing some of Uncle Sam’s bills.

Cheers and may you have a profitable fourth quarter!

By popular demand - export your individual transactions

One of the most common questions we’ve received in our first couple of months in the market has been whether customers can export their information if they decide they don’t like the experience (or if we start charging too much money.) When we launched, we supported the ability to export your income and expense report. However, users wanted the ability to export their individual transactions. Well, we promised we would add that functionality - and so we have. Starting today, users can now export all of their individual income and expense transactions.

To get your individual income and expense transactions out of Bootstrap, simply go to the “Reports” tab where, at the bottom of the detailed income and expense report, you’ll see a link to “Export Transactions.” Click on that link to get a comma-separated list (which imports nicely into Excel and many other applications) of all of your transactions for that time period. Simply choose a different time period to get more or fewer transactions.

Unlike a lot of accounting applications on the market, we will not hold your data hostage. It’s your information, you should be free to do with it as you wish. Now you can:-)

How do you handle clients who don’t pay?

We received a great question from a user today - how does Bootstrap handle situations where a customer hasn’t paid and likely won’t. In the customer’s words, how do you “take a loss?”

Unfortunately, for this situation, you can’t take a loss against other income or enter a deduction for the lost time using Bootstrap. Here’s why: Bootstrap is based on the cash method of accounting (yes, we’re using more of that accounting mumbo jumbo here, but better here than in the actual program:-) That means that you only report income when you’re received payment. And you only report expenses when you’ve spent the money. This is the preferred way for most entrepreneurs to handle their tax records - how many people want to pay taxes on money they haven’t yet received?

Well, in this case, if you haven’t been paid, it means there’s no income to report. There’s a good writeup in the Ernst & Young Tax Guide that better explains the details.

What are the largest write-offs for entrepreneurs?

In doing some research for Bootstrap, our simple online accounting software application, we came across a great report in The Small Business Economy for Data Year 2006: A Report to the President. In it, there was a very interesting table outlining total business deductions for non-farm sole proprietors for the 2004 tax year (more than 20.59 million returns filed.) The top 3 were not very surprising: “Cost of sales and operations” accounted for almost 42% of all deductions (the vast majority of which were purchases), followed by “Other business expenses” at 11% and then
“Salaries and wages” at 8%.

But the next cluster of deduction categories were of much more interest:

• “Car and truck expenses” came in at #4 with 6.6% of all deductions. How much is 6.6%? Try $59 Billion!
• At #5 comes “Depreciation”, accounting for 4.8% of deductions (or $42.9 Billion)
• The next two slots go to “Rent on other business property” and “Supplies”. But coming up close behind is “Contract labor”, where these businesses spent $24.7 Billion! That, my friends, is a lot of 1099s!

I highly recommend that anyone who provides products or services to very small business read this report - it’s a very good summary of a lot of government statistics.

And the Mac user base continues to grow!

When Apple reported earnings earlier this week, one of the first things we looked for was information on Mac shipments and market share. Why? Because Mac users have long been underserved when it comes to accounting software solutions. The lack of quality financial record keeping options on a Mac is one of the primary reasons we started Bootstrap. So when we hear that the Mac now has 8.5% market share in the US (up 2.1% in the last year) and is the #3 U.S. PC maker, we see many more potential entrepreneurs whose lives we can simplify by providing the easiest to use bookkeeping software around.

Nice job Apple (no pun intended). Keep up the good work.

More Bootstrap in the news

We continue to get some really nice mentions/profiles, along with very helpful feedback. Yesterday saw posts on downloadsquad and Small Biz Survival. This came after a weekend post by Web Worker Daily - guess we web workers never rest!

We’ll keep the complete list posted on our press page, which at the time of this post still needs another update:-( But we definitely want to link back to all the nice folks who take the time to write about us. Several of them are targeted specifically to really small business, like BootStrapMe (no relation to our app, just a good name) and D.I.Y.StartupNews

Is there global demand for Bootstrap?

After some very early inquiries about supporting multiple currencies, I pulled up the following chart on our Google Analytics account.

In the first 5 days (through part of today) since we opened the site up to the public, we have had visitors come to Bootstrap from 63 different countries. So naturally this begs the question - what can we do (besides offering support for different currencies) to make Bootstrap more useful to non-US entrepreneurs and businesses? Please send your requests to support@gobootstrap.com. We’re listening!

We love to hear from our customers

I wanted to thank all of our customers who have been sending us feedback since the launch of Bootstrap. During the past couple days we have fixed a number issues and have received quite a few feature requests. Here are a couple enhancements we made the last couple of days:

• Improved date parsing when creating transactions.
• No longer allow a transaction to be created with a 0 amount.
• Fixed a sign flipping bug which was making 0 negative in certain cases.
• Created the Bootstrap Blog.

Stay tuned for a post in the near future which will describe some enhancements we are planning.

Please keep sending us feedback and feature requests. It really helps us prioritize what to work on next.

Bootstrap in the news

With this afternoon’s launch, we had some good initial coverage, most notably by Anthony Ha at VentureBeat.

We also got profiled on Killerstartups

Bootstrap is now open to the public

For entrepreneurs, self employed individuals, and small businesses that file a Schedule C at year’s end - there’s now a simple online bookkeeping web site designed to make running your businesses easier. After a couple of months in “invitation-only” mode, we have officially opened up Bootstrap to the public: www.gobootstrap.com. It’s still in Beta mode (meaning it’s not 100% complete) and remains completely free.

Here are some of the key features:
• Easily track income and expenses, using lots of shortcuts to minimize time
• Quickly see how your business is doing at all times
• Be reminded about estimated tax deadlines and get help calculating how much you owe
• Keep track of how much you pay contractors and freelancers - this will come in handy at the end of the year for sending 1099s
• Export your data in comma-separated format (which can be read by Excel and most financial applications)

You can see for yourself at our product tour. Enjoy and please send us your feedback on how we can improve the site.