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Small Business Resources:  Help from the IRS !?!
        This Free CD Can Actually Save You Time ... and Money

What?

Help from the IRS that's not only free, but useful.

Nonetheless, that's what we discovered when we stumbled upon the IRS' 2nd edition of its Small Business Resource Guide 2000.  In their own words, here's what this CD is all about:

The Small Business Resource Guide, CD-ROM 2000 is intended to be a one-stop source of easy to access federal tax and other regulatory information as well as other information important to small business entrepreneurs. The CD contains business tax forms, instructions, and publications needed by small business owners. In addition, the CD provides an abundance of other helpful information, such as how to prepare a business plan, finding financing for your business, and much more. Although the CD-ROM is designed to be a stand-alone product its value is greatly enhanced for individuals with Internet access. Internet access will enable a small business to; subscribe to a multi-agency e-mail newsletter, view UPDATES to the CD-ROM at a special web site, and link to thousands of government agency, and non-profit web sites that provide important information for small businesses.

The CD was developed in cooperation primarily with the SBA, although the Department of Labor and the Social Security Administration also contributed. Among the many features and tools are several tutorials, such as Basic IRS Requirements for small businesses, as well as links to the SBA Training web site, and more. There's even a video tutorial on tele-filing Form 941, and a 24-slide show on filing info returns electronically.

In addition, the CD contains all of the forms and publications required for setting up & running your small business, and to make tax time less taxing.   Actually, the forms for the coming year's tax returns will be available by an up-date, which you can receive automatic notification for when it's ready.

But the most useful feature a far as we're concerned is the Adobe Acrobat Fill-In software, included free with the CD.

Why?

With the Adobe software, you can actually search individual publications or the entire collection of IRS publications on the CD for text or keywords. In our test run, we ran a couple of quick searches which turned up the appropriate forms or pubs.  One, for "home office," returned 18 results, while "section 179" returned 84 results. The results display in a pop-up window in Acrobat and all you have to do is click on one of them and the form or pub will load with your keyword(s) highlighted.

The IRS lists the Technical Spec requirements as follows:

Windows: Pentium Processor Win 95/98/NT 4.0 32 MB RAM 70 MB available hard drive space Recommended Browser: Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher (Version 5.0 included) QuickTime 3.0 or higher (Version 4.0 included) Adobe Acrobat 4.0 Fill In (Included)

 Macintosh: PowerPC Processor MacOS Version 8.1 or above 16 MB available RAM 70 MB available hard drive space Recommended Browser: Internet Explorer 4.51 (Included) QuickTime 3.0 or higher (Version 4.0 included) Adobe Acrobat 4.0 Fill In (Included) This product is Y2K compliant.

Officially, the CD is Publication 3207 [Rev 2.0], with a catalog no. of 26757M.

If you've ever tried to reach our local IRS offices up in Burlington during business hours, you may want to take advantage of this free offer.

For your copy, click here, or on the link below to go to the IRS site to order.  ...

http://www.irs.ustreas.gov/prod/bus_info/sm_bus/smbus-cd.html

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