If you run a small business, keeping your receipts organized and accessible helps make tax time easier. And with estimated tax payments coming up soon, now is a good time to check out Shoeboxed.com, where you can mail-in or upload your receipts to organize them and get rid of clutter. The information can then be transferred to programs such as Excel, Quickbooks, Freshbooks, Evernote, Quicken, and CSV formats. If you scan and upload your receipts yourself, there is a free option. Or if you’d like to mail your receipts for scanning or use one of the mobile photo capture and upload options, there is a fee depending on how many receipts a month you upload. There is even an option to upload business cards.

To learn more or sign up for a free trial, check out ShoeBoxed.com.  Also check out ShoeBoxed’s blog for great articles on personal finance, taxes and more.

Self-employment particularly among women, many of whom are mothers, is growing at a fast rate, faster even than men owned business. While many begin their work-at-home search hoping to find a job, starting a business is probably the fastest and easies way to start making money at home. But once the product or service is created, the real work is getting the word out. A new website helps self-employed parents by offering a directory that consumers can use to find products and services.

Our Milk Money was started by two work-at-home moms Ally Loprete and Kelli Shand who wanted to help parents find ways to achieve the financial means to stay home or provide more for their children, and to educate consumers about the products and services found through self-employed parents. They provide a searchable directory of businesses through Canada and the United States from which consumers can find local or Internet based businesses from which to shop or find work-at-home opportunities.

To learn more or find a self-employed parent near you, visit Our Milk Money.

Timebridge is offer a free resource that makes it easy for people see your availability and schedule time with you.  The great thing about this resource is that it doesn’t reveal the details of your schedule, only the times that you’re “available” or “busy”.  Further is works with Outlook, Google Calendar, and iCal to synchronize your free/busy availability.

For an additional fee, Timebridge’s Meet With Me also provides a meeting room, web or phone conferencing, and text message reminders to those involved in the meeting.

To learn more, visit TimeBridge.

Need to keep in touch with a group that’s on the go? Tatango offers a text messaging service that can send your message out to everyone in your group. Messages can be composed and sent from a computer or by phone if you’re on the go as well.  Depending on the plan, you can a variety of groups, subgroups and message allotments. Members can use “keywords” which allow people to easily join your group via text or through a link online. Current users include athletic teams, religious organizations, real estate agents and sororities.

Tatango offers a free-30 day trial. Plans vary from basic at $19 a month for 400 messages and unlimited members all the way up to the premium for $199 a month for 5000 messages and few other perks (there are two plans in between). To learn more or test out a free trial, visit Tatango.com

There is an old adage that says, “You can never be too safe.” When it comes to the digital world, it’s very true. Cyber hackers and hijackers are lurking everywhere to steal digital information. And while it’s a piece of cake for them to get passwords and other sensitive information, for the rest of us, keeping track of login information is a hassle especially since everything needs its own password. It’s too much and eventually passwords get forgotten.

Forgetting a password isn’t that big of deal when you’re online as there is usually a way to retrieve it or reset it, but what if you’ve password protected your documents? Well if it’s an Excel document, you’re in luck.

Excel allows users to password protect entire documents or individual workbooks. You can even allow people to read the document but not make changes without a password. So what happens if a colleague moves without giving you the password to his work-related Excel doc? Or you simply forget your password? Over at Petri IT Knowledge Base you can find complete details and a free download for Excel Password Recovery. It takes you step-by-step through two recovery options and even provides an alternative Pro solution if needed.

Bandwidth, transfer allowance, CGI, SQL and so on and so on. Knowing what these mean is only part of the work that goes into selecting a web host. You also need to know if and how much of these you need. Then there is price and level of technical support. You need a notebook to keep track of all the features of each web host in order to compare. Or you can visit WebHostingReport.com.

WebHostingReport.com evaluates and ranks web hosts on a variety of factors to help you pick the best one for your needs. It evaluates hosting based on price, uptime, customer service, and user feedback.

Looking for domain hosting?  WebHostingReport.com lists its top five and includes a review so you can see why it liked it. It also ranks web hosts that provide dedictated web hosting if you don’t want to share servers with other websites. Or if price is an issue, you can search for cheap hosting.

More than just ranking and reviewing web hosts though, WebHostingReport.com also provides information for beginners, tips on choosing a web host, and advice on why free hosting is not a good idea. Its a great resource for learning about web hosting as well as advice on choosing the web host that will best fit your needs.

During my vacation my blog went down. The situation was made worse by the fact that I was not staying in a place with wi-fi. It took me half a day to get to a location (a library) to get online to figure out what happened. Even worse, the fix was more complicated and time consuming than I wanted to deal with. So I paid someone to fix it for me. But had I had IT support on board already, it would have discovered and fixed the problem leaving me free to enjoy my vacation.

So how do you find great IT support?  IT Support Los Angeles has a great article on “6 Things You Need to Know When Choosing a Partner for IT Support and IT Consulting”. It not only emphasizes the importance of accessible help personnel when needed, but also having your systems monitored and issues resolved remotely when needed.

In fact, I wish I lived in the Los Angeles area as IT consulting Los Angeles has a great maintenance care program that could have saved me time, hassle and worry while I was on vacation. In small business, there is so much focus on marketing, sales and product or service delivery, that often the maintenance of systems is overlooked…until it goes down. Although we know technology can cause problems, we don’t anticipate them or have safe guards for when they go on the fritz. The problem is that when technology does fail, often everything else about the business comes to a stop.

But with a resources such as the Dependable Computer Guys of LA, your IT systems can be monitored and serviced to avoid problems that can put your business on hold. It provides a team of IT people who provide weekly maintenance on servers and systems, remote support for servers and work stations, and they can even assess your company’s need to determine the best IT solutions to maximize your business. It is an ideal resource for small business computer service in the Los Angeles area.

A couple of years ago I was checking my web stats and noticed that one URL seemed to making a lot of hits on one of my graphics. Visiting the site I discovered it was using my logo as its own. This was potentially very bad for me as my site was about finding legitimate work-at-home opportunities and the site that was stealing my logo was a scam. People who didn’t know better would think that I was promoting the scam or at the very least endorsing it. It could have ruined my credibility.

Copyright infringement is rampant on the Internet, and its hard to know what materials are being stolen and where they are posted. But at TinEye.com you can an least find out if your logo, image, or other graphics are being used somewhere other than where you placed them.

TinEye has an easy to use image search engine for graphics. Just upload the graphic or give the URL of the graphic and it will show you where else the graphic is being used. You may be surprised to find your pretty mug showing up on a different  site! Or your logo!

To learn more visit TinEye.com

Results of a search on my photo image. Sparkplugging has permission to use this photo.

The major package shipping companies provide tracking services, but you have to know the URL of each site’s tracking page to use it. Or you can use PackTrack.com to trace a package from USPS, UPS or DHL. It’s a no-frills site so it won’t confuse you or slow you down. Its features include:

• Customizable quick-access buttons.
• Package tracking log for fast re-tracking.
• Access to multiple carriers’ tracking on one fast-loading web page.

PackTrack is free to use! To learn more, visit Packtrack.com.

Ever need a contract or other legal form, but don’t want to hire an lawyer? WhichDraft allows you to automatically create legal forms for free. The site makes it easy by offering wizards to help you put your form together.  WhichDraft has a database of pre-made legal forms in a variety of categories or you can search for documents created by other users. You save your form and even share it with others.

WhichDraft is NOT a lawyer nor does it offer legal advice. But it does offer self-directed assistance to creating legal documents. Learn more by visiting WhichDraft.