Online Tax Resources for Canadian Small Businesses

Let's face it: managing projects, getting new clients or working on that new big idea take up most of our time, and filing taxes (rarely an exciting activity) gets almost always pushed to the bottom of our to-do list. I, for one, don't look forward to sifting through my shoebox once a month, checking if I didn't miss anything before handing it over to my bookkeeper.

As taxes are part of your obligations, understanding what is involved will save your business money. A recent article in Moneyville (a publication of TheStar.com) talks about 7 tax mistakes people do with their taxes, and among them, claiming out of the ordinary expenses and categorizing a hobby as a business can trigger red flags for the CRA. Canadian Bookkeepers Association also talks about costly mistakes small businesses make - and two of the most common are: not saving receipts less than $50 and miscategorizing expenses.

Matching Trends in Canadian and US Start-ups

The entrepreneurial landscape in Canada and US is changing at an unprecedented rate. More and more people choose to start a business and reasons vary from the desire to control their own destiny, to life changes or inability to find a job. The continuous decrease of start-up costs helps too.

There are some interesting facts about the start-ups created in the past 10 years that could help businesses in the B2B market to identify new opportunities and find ideas to address their needs better.

Solo businesses are on the rise

A new report released by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, shows that although the US start-up rates had increased significantly during 1996-2010, entrepreneurs prefer to go solo rather than assuming the economic responsibility that comes with hiring employees.

Four Ways to Harness the Power of the Crowds in Your Business

As more and more people get comfortable networking and collaborating online, the idea of crowdsourcing is increasing in popularity, spreading from micro businesses to corporations and government.

For those who are not familiar with the term, crowdsourcing means to engage a community of people to perform a task, rather than hiring a traditional provider or employee. The online process starts by posting the problem on a specialized community; the crowd submits ideas which are reviewed by the company (some models involve crowd vetting, as well) and then a winner is selected.

The benefits of getting ideas from multiple sources are easy to see: problems can be solved cheaper, with better results than engaging a single provider. There are many crowdsourcing platforms that have become available in the past few years (Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Elance are some of the largest), and new ones are popping up every day, trying to take advantage of unexploited niches.