Endless Solutions Inc – Susan R. Davis

Microsoft Office 2010 is coming very soon, and Microsoft is offering their usual deal again. If you make a qualifying purchase of Microsoft Office 2007 now, you can be eligible to get Office 2007 upgraded to Office 2010 for free.

If you purchase and activate qualifying Office 2007 products from Microsoft or a qualifying reseller between March 5th and September 30, 2010, you can receive a free download copy of the corresponding Office 2010 product when Office 2010 is released. You can also purchase a product disc for a fee. You will have until October 31, 2010 to request your product upgrade.

The new Office 2010 is chock full of performance-boosting features. To be honest, I didn’t think too much of the 2003 to 2007 upgrade, but I certainly think they’ve done an excellent job with the 2010 upgrade.

My Favorite Features in the new Office 2010:

1. Enhanced Ribbon feature:  the Ribbon is better than ever and it now works across all apps with special contextual features based on which application you are using.
2. Powerpoint will now allow you to do static graphic image editing and video editing right in the program so you’re not constantly flipping in and out of Powerpoint to get the job done. Adobe is going to hate this one!
3. Shared use on documents is finally here. Lightweight web-browser versions of Office Web Apps are here, and Microsoft says that formatting will be preserved in these documents. Now you can collaborate with others more easily. If you have a Windows Live SkyDrive account, it is integrated with Office Web Apps and you can view and edit documents through a web browser. Office doesn’t even have to be loaded on your computer – even on a Mac. This is going to give Google Docs a big run for their money.
4. Revamped Print Dialog box:  Now you can tweak settings like margins right in the Print Dialog box and see a preview copy of the changes side-by-side with the various settings. I absolutely love this one. It’s about time Microsoft did this.
5. PDF creation is now native to Office – no add-on required – another big Ouch for Adobe.
6. Screen Clips in all applications:   now you can take screenshot clips of things on your desktop and insert them into Office documents. No special screen capture program is required, and you don’t have to use the clunky Print-Screen option.
7. Paste Preview:  this cool little tool allows you to see what your resulting content will look like using different Paste options. Never have to “Paste Special” over and over until you find the one you want.
8. When you open an email message inside Outlook 2010, it will show you related information such as email attachments, pictures, meeting requests and all previous email messages that you may have exchanged with that person – neatly displayed in a preview pane below the message.
9. Outlook also has two other features to improve your workflow. QuickSteps in Outlook allows you to create a combination of steps bunched into one command (for example “Reply and Delete” or “Send and Archive”). And Outlook now has a cool feature that allows you to eliminate email noise in your workday. You can tell it to ignore past and future emails on a particular subject line, and the entire thread will no longer bother you. Vanished. Poof.

Microsoft has finally started concentrating on features that will improve user productivity and stopped fussing with “pretty” changes. One of the biggest problems I’ve always had with Office products is their tendency to be very rigid in terms of usability. I think that Office 2010 is going to break free of that particular problem.

Has anyone else used the beta of Microsoft Office 2010 yet? Share your experience here with the rest of us.

Tags: Microsoft Office 2010, New Office Features, Save on Office 2010

Tax season is here, and it’s time to equip yourself with the best information and software you can. Improve your productivity with software that helps you find the best deductions, and even things you might have missed. And it does the math!

This is my second year using TurboTax software for my corporation and my personal taxes, and I’ve got to say I love it. It founds two deductions this year that I totally would have missed, and I’m no newbie at doing accounting and taxes.

If you’d like a great source for tax products this season, check out Buy.com Tax Center for low prices on tax software, books and more. I think they’ve got it all, and their prices are pretty hard to beat. Might as well save a bit of money up front to help you save money on those pesky taxes. Why give it to the IRS anyway? Thanks to their help this year, I knocked a good $1,000 off of my tax bill, which I can honestly say is no small peanuts.

Even if you’re not the studying type who loves to devour books on such terrible topics as taxes, at least get some nifty software to help you dig out good deductions, save money on taxes, and alert you to possible audit risks so you can set your mind at ease about a call or letter from you-know-who.

Nobody I know likes giving the government more money than necessary, so go on the offensive this tax season and slash that tax bill! Do you have any good tax tips or advice to share with readers?

As someone who has been around the block a few times preparing taxes, there is one thing I can tell you for sure. Absolutely, positively, do your own research before having someone else prepare them. No tax preparer is perfect, and none of them are you, with your in-depth knowledge of your life and your spending habits.

Go to the IRS site and look at the forms and their instructions that you usually file, like the 1040 form. Also check out the instruction booklets for types of deductions you think you might qualify for. Then make sure to look through documents and receipts in your life and compile some kind of a list of the things you think you qualify for. This will help a paid preparer to better identify areas to look for deductions in.

I know you probably hate doing this kind of thing like you hate going to the dentist, but think of it this way. Every little bit of research increases your chance of keeping your money instead of tossing it at the government. Think about being able to protect your money and spend it on something you want.

Tags: Save on Tax bill, Tax Information, Tax Software

Even though you are a business, your personal credit reports and scores have a role to play in your business success. Managing your credit reports and scores is crucial to keeping your costs reasonable for your business.

Why Your Credit Report and Score is Critical

If you are a sole proprietorship, as many entrepreneurs start out, any loans you need or credit relationships with vendors you apply for will involve an analysis of your credit-worthiness. You are an unknown quantity to them, and so they look to your credit reports and score for information.

What Lenders and Vendors Look At

Your credit report has a lot to say about your personal habits in managing money. Creditors – banks and vendors – are looking to see if you are going to be reliable in your cash management. They want to see if you will repay on time – and consistently. If you are planning on a personal equity line of credit, equity loan, or refinance on your home to finance operations or growth, or even purchasing real estate for your business operations, good personal credit is crucial.

They are specifically looking at:

• Whether or not you have over-extended yourself. Do you have too much credit available? Are you possibly planning to run balances up to keep your business afloat with an influx of quick cash?
• Are your credit card and loan balances close to your maximum credit allowed? Having high balances on your cards, or large loans, can indicate that you are relying on credit for cash flow (both personally and for business), which makes lenders and vendors nervous about being yet another creditor hoping for payback.
• Do you pay on time? If you have a string of 30, 60, or 90 day late records on your credit accounts? Being able to pay on time according to credit terms is a big deal to your creditors. It shows that you are not good at managing your cash flow and maintaining a proper budget. They don’t want to extend credit and be left holding the bag on your debts.
• Do you have a bankruptcy or collection agencies on your credit reports? These are both very bad signs for a potential creditor to see. They are usually indicators that you don’t know how to manage your money. And if you can’t manage your personal finances, why should they think you can handle business finances (which are usually much larger sums)?
• And lastly, are your creditors closing accounts on you? Proactive creditors, fearing that one of the above issues might prevent them from getting their money out of you, may close your account to further charging, which is a big indicator to other creditors that even your current creditors don’t trust you to pay back your debts. It may seem like a small thing, but it’s bad news on your credit report. Better for you to close the account first.

All of the above things are critical to being approved for loans, bank lines of credit, and vendor lines of credit, especially for sole proprietorship companies. But I’m sure you’re wondering about how your personal credit reports and scores can affect you if your business is a partnership or corporation.

It affects you far more than you might think. Any business without a strong and lengthy track record may require personal guarantees from owners and/or officers to obtain credit. This is especially true if you are applying for a larger line of credit. If it is outside of your company’s usual level of financing, creditors will want to see proof that they’ll get their money back somehow. Even if it is out of your personal hide. They may or may not require a formal agreement where your personal funds back up the line of credit, but they’ll certainly want to know that you have the resources and ability to step in to help the business if necessary.

So What’s the Bottom Line?

You need to keep a close eye on your credit reports and scores. Something as simple as a mistake by a creditor, or as complex as identity theft, can really mess up your personal credit. You need to regularly check your reports with the three major credit bureaus and fix anything that is wrong. And if you are a business owner with assets to protect, you need to take extra care to avoid identity theft.

And it’s not just about your business. You need to protect your family in this time of financial upheaval. If your business pays your family’s bills, then keeping your credit clean is all about protecting your family as well. Don’t let somebody else’s mistakes or a malicious thief ruin your ability to provide for yourself and your family.

How to Monitor Your Credit Reports

There are basically two ways to go about this – paid and free.

You can obtain one copy of your credit report each year from the three bureaus at AnnualCreditReport.com. However, you have to pay for the credit scores separately. Also, as a business, you don’t really want to wait a year between reports. If something goes wrong, you need to catch it before then. Quarterly monitoring is probably the minimum you should consider.

Your second option, and I highly recommend this as a necessary business expense, is to either obtain your credit reports once a quarter by paying each credit bureau for them, or (and even more useful) to have your credit monitored on a regular basis by a credit monitoring agency.

Benefits of Credit Monitoring

The expense is usually quite minimal, but it includes several benefits:

1. You can get copies of your credit reports when you need them. If you are concerned about a possible sudden change in your credit, you can check when you need to without the additional cost of doing it at the credit bureau.
2. You get constant identity theft and credit monitoring. If something negative comes across the board, such as somebody applying for credit in your name, changing contact information in your reports, or other sudden changes, you’ll be notified immediately so you can take action.
3. You can watch for potential reporting errors much easier. Creditors do sometimes make mistakes in reporting your payment history, or over-limit charges, or other mistakes. You can watch carefully, at no extra cost, to make sure these are corrected before your credit score suffers.

I highly recommend that you keep a close watch on your credit these days. Identity theft is up, credit reporting mistakes are up (sometimes creditors report other people’s problems on your reports), and you never know when some stupid collections agency will post a bad mark on your record for not responding to them when they’ve actually been interacting with someone else about their debts.

If nothing else, it’s good for your peace of mind to know what the credit bureaus are reporting. If you can’t afford monthly monitoring over time, at least take advantage of a monitoring agency’s services for a short while, just to ensure that all is well with your credit. I’ve personally done the free route before, and with all of the individual sign-ups, paying each bureau for scores, etc., letting the monitoring folks do it for you is so much easier. As a business person, I’m sure you understand – like I do – how much your time is really worth.

What do you think about credit reports and credit monitoring? Any good stories to share with either route?

Tags: credit bureau, credit lines, credit report, credit score, creditors, identity theft, loans, vendors