Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Brandon Rose


A new software platform offering small businesses tools to quickly and easily track income and expenses and estimate taxes is free through a beta period that began July 9.

Called simply Bootstrap (no connection to this site) the platform allows business to:
• Calculate business profits through the end of the current IRS quarter or the year to date
• Calculate social security and medicare contributions using IRS rates
• Calculate a business income tax using a marginal tax rate based on income to date.

Co-founders Kevin Reeth and Ben Curren, both veterans of the software for business industry, explain the purpose of their new platform on their website:

Bootstrap was...created after watching a number of small businesses like ourselves struggle to capture all of their business deductions, often piecing togther a number of different solutions. Whether it was sticking every possible receipt in a file folder and shipping it off to a bookkeeper, or tracking everything in a huge spreadsheet, or even using a couple of different web sites to track time and create invoices, the results were invariably the same: too much time and effort spent on the least enjoyable part of running one's own business.

You can take a tour and sign up for a free account here and we'll try to post new developments when they become available.