how to start a business

Big Business 7.01
Big Business lends you the chance of using such a useful business management solution that can integrate four critical business functions--sales, purchasing, inventory, and accounting eliminating redundancy, automating workflow, and increasing productivity by centralizing important data in a single system that can grow as companies expand. more>>
Big Business 7.01 lends you the chance of using such a useful business management solution that can integrate four critical business functions--sales, purchasing, inventory, and accounting eliminating redundancy, automating workflow, and increasing productivity by centralizing important data in a single system that can grow as companies expand.
Big Business is available in single-user and multi-user, client/ versions. Business owners can start with the single-user version and then move to the multi-user version and add users as their companies grow.
Major Features:
- Internet:
- Big Business automates the process of creating and maintaining an online catalog of products or services on the Internet. Big Business exports items, item descriptions, prices, and pictures into formatted HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language). In plain English, that means Big Business makes Web pages of the products you sell.
- You simply click a button and Big Business creates three-level Web pages with the proper links. You select which items you want to export. You can also have Big Business create a "What's New or Hot" category for a product, as well as have it appear under its normal category. When you add new products or change prices, you select an option and Big Business creates new Web pages, ready to copied to your Web Server or Internet Service Provider (ISP). You also have the option of editing the Big Business Web page templates.
- Payroll Interface: Big Business connects to leading payroll products from Aatrix Software (Macintosh only) and CheckMark Software, Inc. Big Business imports paycheck and journal information directly from the payroll systems, so you can perform your company's payroll in-house, saving you time and money.
- Reports and Forms Designer: A built-in reports and forms designer allows you to create custom reports and forms. The designer is a full-featured, WYSIWYG report writer that has access to all the information in Big Business. You can use and modify any of the pre-made reports and forms templates or create your own custom ones. You can even import forms that other users or consultants have created in their version of Big Business.
- Import Quicken Data: To upgrade your system to Big Business, you can now easily import Quicken data during setup.
- Expanded Export and Import Capabilities:
- You can export nearly any information from Big Business in tab-delimited format, including names, addresses, balances, phone numbers, information regarding different transactions, custom field entries, terms, departments, ship methods, and more.
- You can also import tab-delimited data from any type of program, including contact managers, accounting programs, spreadsheets, or databases. General journal entries can be imported from another payroll or fixed asset module.
- International Currency Support: Big Business supports the currency symbols for 16 English speaking countries. You can specify which country's formatting to use and customize the formatting of quantities, amounts, and totals. You can change the date formatting in all date fields to coincide with the country's date setting.
- International Taxation: Big Business handles VAT tax, particularly any requirements needed to meet Canada's tax regulations, including the ability to pay tax on a tax. This feature allows you to have an unlimited number of taxing entities per tax.
- Multiple Bill To/Ship To Addresses: Big Business allows you to use customer and vendor contact addresses as additional bill to/ship to addresses. An easy-to-use popup window makes selecting the address fast and saves you from retyping the information.
- Royalties You can add royalty rates or amounts by item and create a royalty report on sales by item.
- Commissions: Commission codes and rates can be added to employee cards, allowing you to decide if commissions are calculated on sales, profits and sales, or paid invoices. You can also generate a variety of commission reports.
- Strong Security: Big Business gives administrators complete control over the access individual users have to tabs, fields, tools, and toolbars. Each user can be required to enter a unique password before even entering Big Business.
- Long Item Descriptions: Item descriptions can be up to 32K, which is approximately one page of text. Use this feature to enter technical specifications or detailed telemarketing scripts about an item.
- Long Comment Fields:
- You can include long comment fields of up to 32K on quote, order, and invoice line items. This feature is especially helpful for entering long comments or technical specifications about an item.
- You specify if you want a long item description loaded into the line item comments field, allowing you to store technical specifications in the item master and print them on forms.
- Printed Comments Notification: You can see if a quote, order, or invoice has a printed comment. The Printed Comment icon at the bottom of all entry screens now displays that comments have been entered.
- Memorize/Recall Searches: You can memorize and recall frequently-used searches.
- Convert Contacts: At the click of a button, you can easily convert contacts into vendors or customers. You save time from re-entering data when the relationship with the contact changes.
- Pricing Flexibility: Big Business lets set different price levels for different types of customers. You can also override the default price level on individual quotes, orders, or invoices.
- New Notes Alert: You are alerted to new notes that have arrived from other users. You simply specify how often you want to be notified.
- Other Charges Field: Big Business lets you calculate any charge based on weight, subtotal, total, and taxable amount. The charge can be calculated based on a percentage or an amount and is especially helpful when calculating freight costs.
- Weight Field: A weight field calculates the weight of each line item, which can be used by the Other Charges field to calculate freight charges.
- More Printing Options: A new user preference allows you to set up different printing defaults for quotes, orders, or invoices. You can also have Big Business print multiple copies of quotes, orders, or invoices by selecting the number of printouts for each form.
- Multi-Level Credit Management: You have complete control customer credit levels with the credit hold feature and comprehensive credit manager.
- Additional Chart of Accounts: Big Business offers 90 industry-specific chart of accounts for all types of companies.
- Flexible History Viewing: You can tell Big Business to display transaction histories for customers, vendors, and items for a certain number of days. By setting a date limit, you actually speed operations, as Big Business no longer needs to display the entire transaction history of the customer, vendor, or item.
- Improved Credit Management: Customers don't pay? You can place them on credit hold and control how the credit limit/credit hold is used. You have three options for customers who have exceeded their credit limits or are on credit hold: ignore the conditions and not display a message; issue a warning; or prohibit entry of transactions for customers who exceed the credit limit or have been put on credit hold.
- More Decimal Places: You can establish the number of decimal places you want Big Business to calculate, particularly for quantities, unit price/cost, average cost, and extended price and cost.
- Display Employee Check History: For payroll purposes, you can display employee checks that have been imported by the payroll system or by the Miscellaneous Checks tool.
- Modify Selections: After performing a quick search, you can apply a value to the records displayed. This feature is especially useful for updating data in groups.
- Credit Card Transfers: Transfer on credit card prints checks to pay credit card bills.
- Save to Disk: All reports can be saved to disk for further manipulation and analysis in another program.
Enhancements:
- Is a second Beta release for additional testing with a newly Snow Leopard-certified engine update. If you installed the previous Beta, all Clients need to be updated.
Requirements:
- Single-User: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, or 10.4 Tiger, or 10.3 Panther, with 1 GB of RAM recommended, and 200 MB of storage space recommended.
- Server: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, or 10.4 Tiger, or 10.3 Panther, with 2 GB of RAM recommended, and 1 GB of storage space recommended.
- Client: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, or 10.4 Tiger, or 10.3 Panther, with 1 GB of RAM recommended, and 100 MB of storage space recommended.
License:update/patch
Start Jack For Mbox
A free script to automatically start Jack OSX and make it work correctly with the Mbox almost every time more>> A free script to automatically start Jack OSX and make it work correctly with the Mbox almost every time
Start Jack for Mbox is an easy to use script that launches Jack, opens and saves prefs (as seems to be needed each time for Mbox), then starts Jack.
Blasted Mbox... Now this is really just an example of using UI interface scripting to control normally non-applescriptable applications.
System requirements:
- Uses UI scripting, so assistive devices access must be enabled in Universal Access prefpane. If it is not, the script should tell you.
- Jackpilot must be enabled in the Digi Coreaudio setup.
Last Start? 1.3
Last Start? - Displays how much time has passed since last startup more>>
Example: The computer has been on for: 1 day. 20 hours. 5 minutes. 13 seconds.
Completly freeware.
Enhancements:
- Full rewrite for Mac OS X.
The Social Business Club RSS Widget 1.0
The Social Business Club RSS Widget - RSS Reader for several feeds from the Social Business Club more>> The Social Business Club RSS Widget - RSS Reader for several feeds from the Social Business Club
With The Social Business Club RSS Widget, you can browse the following RSS Feeds from the Social Business Club directly from your desktop:
- PR & News English,
- PR & News German,
- Short News English,
- Short News German,
- Jobs English,
- Jobs German,
- Blogs English,
- Blogs German.
System requirements:
- Internet connection.
QuickTrack Start X V
Track inventory location records. more>>
Details of items and users or locations are filed and can then be booked in or out by scanning barcodes or using the keyboard.
Quicktrack Start V
Asset, item or loan tracking system. more>>
A full license is free with the purchase of any barcode reader from barcodereaders.com.
EZ Business Manager 4.0
Keep track of all aspects of your business. more>>
EZ Business Manager 4.0 is designed to be an effective tool for you in a time where small innovative companies are abundant. These companies don't have the funds to pay for a full blown business manager. But now they can, because EZ Business Manager is 100% free! Just download it and get started managing your company.

Smart Label Mac 1.7
Seiko Instruments has released a new version of its Smart Label Printer (SLP) application, driver and SDK for Macintosh users. more>>
Supporting the new Apple Intel processor platform for the first time, the Smart Label Mac software adds usability and reliability enhancements and improved bar code printing functionality.
SLP customers can download the new and improved software at no charge from the company website: http://www.siibusinessproducts.com/support/slpsoft.html. The Smart Label Mac software will start shipping with Seiko Smart Label Printers in mid-October.
Seiko Instruments USA expanded its SLP flagship line with additions supporting Mac users in June 2005. The SLP 410, 420, 430 and 450 models feature a sleek new industrial design and offer full-functionality single label printing for envelopes, files, storage boxes, floppy or Zip disks, video cassettes, 35mm slides, bar codes and a variety of other office and home applications. The small footprint, desktop printers also make great name tags and ID badges for parties, trade shows, conferences and other business or social events.
Start Menu 1.0
Start Menu is known as a free, yet very useful software for Mac OS X which provides a simplified Start Menu functionality from the Windows world. more>>
Start Menu 1.0 is known as a free, yet very useful software for Mac OS X which provides a simplified Start Menu functionality from the Windows world. Just copy Start Menu program into any folder on your Mac (your user's folder recommended) and then drag and drop it into any place of the Dock. Then you'll be able to browse the list of all installed Applications and run what you need with a single mouse click - like you do in Windows.
POPFile Startup 1.0.1
Launches POPFile email filtering at startup more>>
This allows POPFile to start at login time so that email filtering is always available.
The advantage of starting at login time instead of at system startup is that multiple users can have different buckets and settings.
Tomcat Collar 1.1
Tomcat Collar is a widget that will help you to start and stop Apache Tomcat without being forced to open shell more>>
FM Starting Point 1.0v10
FM Starting Point offers you a free FileMaker template designed for using with FileMaker Pro 10. more>>
FM Starting Point 1.0v10 offers you a free FileMaker template designed for using with FileMaker Pro 10. It is focused on small businesses, work groups, and non-profit organizations. These templates were built with the experience gained from working with these target groups for over 18 years.
New FileMaker Pro users that are familiar with the Starter Solutions that come bundled with FileMaker Pro, will enjoy using FM Starting Point for an integrated approach to their business solution needs. Experienced FileMaker Pro users will value a FREE tool that makes building a new project substantially easier. Includes FREE version of 360Works SuperContainer for easy document management.
FM Starting Point provides you with a free yet efficient FileMaker template designed for use ... with FileMaker Pro 10, and is focused on small businesses, work groups, and non-profitLicense:Freeware

JumpBox for the SugarCRM CRM System 1.1.5
This is a useful tool, which is designed to help business save time and money. more>> JumpBox for the SugarCRM CRM System 1.1.5 is a useful tool which is designed to help business save time and money. SugarCRM is the market-leading, commercial Open Source customer relationship management (CRM) application. SugarCRM's Open Source architecture easily adapts to any business environment by offering a more flexible, cost-effective alternative than proprietary applications. For a small business the JumpBox for SugarCRM can be a huge time and expense saver.
Deploying an application as a JumpBox provides a dramatically-reduced path to getting started with the software. Aside from installation benefits it yields other advantages such as portability across computing environments and simplified ongoing maintenance of the application.
Major Features:
- An intuitive user interface to quickly guide users through deployment.
- A web-based control panel for simplified management of system functions.
- A backup system that enables data security and portability.
- Self-contained deployment means easy to move or delete - it won't scatter files all over your operating system.
- New versions of the JumpBox contain updates to each component in the software stack so there's no patching web servers, application servers, databases, dependencies, etc.
- A web-based administration console simplifies the management of your application including SSL certs, email relaying, SSH, backups and more.
- Once you know how to install a JumpBox you can deploy any of 50+ other JumpBoxes and take advantage of a growing library of conveniently-packaged Open Source software.
Requirements:
- Computer running any of: Mac OS X, Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows Vista, Linux
- Virtualization software. See the complete list of supported systems.
- For easiest use: a network that assigns dynamic IP addresses. (Most do)
- 3 GB Free disk space
- Minimum 1 GB System RAM (Each JumpBox you run on the same system will need 256-512MB of additional RAM)
- Minimum 1 Ghz CPU
Business cards Search 1.0
Business cards Search - Search for business cards on Business Card Collection by keyword, color, profession, or designer more>>
License:Freeware
StartBox 0.1a
StartBox is an advanced program which satisfies you with an iTunes remote and Start Menu. more>> StartBox 0.1a is an advanced program which satisfies you with an iTunes remote and Start Menu.
Enhancements:
- Early alpha release
- Mac OS X 10.0 or later
- iTunes