A Guide to Useful Accounting Websites

Accounting websites have been gaining in popularity lately due to the upsurge of online entrepreneurs and internet-based businesses. Accounting can be a big headache, especially for an entrepreneur or a small business without an internal accounting department. More often than not, you have to do all the number-crunching work, and this can get tedious. It's difficult enough if you're filing your taxes. But it gets even more difficult when you have employees, and if you are doing regular computations for your employees' salaries, insurance contributions, social security payments, and the like.

The World Wide Web is a rich resource of information on all things accounting. But it can get difficult to search if you would just be inputting “accounting” into a Google search box. Here are a few websites you can refer to for your accounting needs.

Taxsites.com

The taxsites.com main page serves as a portal to different areas of accounting-related literature, resources and links. Perhaps the first thing you would be looking for are tax-related rules and legal rulings. Taxsites.com has quick links to important pages like IRS forms that you can download and print. The site also has easy links to quick calculator tools that you can use to compute for your tax obligations.

Taxsites.com also has convenient links to published legal rulings about accounting and tax related matters, such as findlaw.com.This would be very useful if you are researching for accounting- and tax-related lawsuits that your business might be involved in (or at least if you’re trying to avoid liabilities). Lastly, the site has links to payroll and human resources topics that any small business owner would find useful, especially if you are managing a growing organization.

1040.com

This website is more attuned to tax information and assistance. The site’s basic service involves online preparation of your tax forms and electronic filing. While 1040.com is intended for use by individuals, entrepreneurs who are filing as self-employed would find the website useful. Aside from the full tax filing service, you can also use the free tax calculator and other online tools for computing your tax requirements for the past year.

Dwmbeancounter.com

This site is meant to be a lighter (even humorous at times) take at a serious topic like accounting, but it’s rich in resources for any entrepreneur or small business. The site offers online tutorials in bookkeeping for a nominal fee, and also free ebook downloads. The Bean Counter website also links to various free and premium software that owners of small businesses would find useful in boosting productivity, such as office software, accounting software, groupware and the like.

Most online accounting websites would deal with common topics like taxation, human resources and payroll, and asset management. While these sites assume you can do things yourself or at least use online tools to make the job easier, they also offer professional services and advice if you would rather pay a small price to have someone else crunch your numbers for you. After all, your time is gold, and if you can earn more by spending your time in more productive activities than counting beans, then you're better off passing on the accounting jobs to experts.