Home Business Information

The Budget Home Office Just as important as your readiness to work from home is the readiness of your home office. More than just a penny-pincher's guide to the latest technology, Outfitting Your Home Business for Much Less by Walter Zooi with Paul and Sarah Edwards ($19; Amacom) is an informative, detailed guide to setting up a comfortable, fully functioning home office within your means.

You'll find useful information on buying computers, printers, and software, as well as strategies for finding copiers, fax machines, furniture, supplies, and telecommunications devices--even getting the upper hand with telephone companies and Internet service providers. Finally, the book teaches you how to negotiate the best rates for essential business services such as accounting, legal, and travel. Whether you're a home office novice or seasoned business owner, Outfitting Your Home Business for Much Less will give you the expertise to make well-informed purchasing decisions.

The Key to Your Customer's Heart In today's groundbreaking economy, can you bring your home-based company's sales to the next level and compete with the big boys? "Yes? says Philip R. Nulman, author of Just Say Yes! Extreme Customer Service ... How to Give It! How to Get It! ($15; Career Press).

This guide helps you grow your business by adhering to one basic principle--customers are your most important asset and you should strive to exceed their needs, not just meet them.

Just Say Yes! offers practical advice on training employees to be customer-service-oriented, commonsense solutions to customer-relations problems, and tips on building customer loyalty. Inside you'll also find detailed case studies of numerous winning strategies and techniques for attracting and keeping customers.

Nulman's philosophy of stop-at-nothing customer service may seem like an anomaly in today's impersonal e-commerce world, but he contends it's a surefire way to ensure your business success.

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Raun and Christina Swafford of Clarksville, Tennessee, were thrilled when they found out they were expecting their first child. Now that their family would be expanding, the couple felt it was time to take inventory and make some changes in their lives. They started by thinking about moving. "We realized we needed more space for the baby," says Christina. "Also, we were considering having my morn come and move in with us, and we thought owning our own land would be a wonderful thing." With that, the Swaffords packed up their townhouse and went looking for a home of their own. They purchased a three-bedroom house last April for $86,900.

With interest rates still near historic lows and the growing popularity of low down payments and "no money down" mortgage programs, more families and individuals are taking the plunge into first-time homeownership. "Buying is a viable option because it provides a tax write-off, it allows owners to build equity, and it is a sign of a stable [financial] future," says Pierre Dunagan, president of The Dunagan Group, which offers mortgages and other financial services. Dunagan says many people are still delaying building wealth through homeownership because they think they must already have the money in the bank to do it. "People assume they'll need 15% to 20% down to get their first home, which is simply not the case these days."

Fannie Mae, while not a lending institution itself, is a government-sponsored enterprise that buys loans from lenders to make mortgage financing available to more borrowers. A number of financing programs that don't require the standard 20% down payment--or any down payment at all--are available through approved Fannie Mae lenders and mortgage companies. One of them is the Flexible 100 program, which is especially popular with first-time home buyers. Borrowers need only contribute $500 toward the down payment and/or closing costs. The Flexible 97 program, which allows borrowers to put up just 3% of the cost of the home, is also available through Fannie Mae. Banks have created similar programs to help new home buyers. To obtain a list of approved Fannie Mae lenders, log on to www.fanniemaefoundation.org or call 800-7-FANNIE.

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TurboTax gets down to business.

Taxes are never fun, but they can Jibe easy. And it doesn't get any easier than TurboTax. The market-leading software from Intuit (www.quicken.com) has two business versions: TurboTax Home & Business for sole proprietors and TurboTax for Business for corporations and partnerships.

Both versions offer the simple, clean interface that has become a TurboTax trademark, and both lead you through the tax-preparation process step by step. Home & Business costs $64.95 (street), and TurboTax for Business is $79.95 (street).

Home & Business begins with optional videos and written instructions to explain the process and offers the ability to consult with live experts (an additional fee may be required). Then you're ready to fill out your Schedule C. Throughout the process, TurboTax reminds you what information and forms you need and offers more optional but helpful videos.

New to Home & Business is the Automated Tax Return feature, which imports basic tax information into the correct forms, making the process even easier. It also features the Home Office Expert, which offers advice on deductions and filing for home-office proprietors. Home & Business also allows employers to prepare and print forms W-2 and 1099-MISC for employees and contractors.

TurboTax for Business is aimed at larger businesses, specifically corporations (1120), fiduciaries (1041), LLCs, partnerships (1065) and S-corporations (1120-S). In addition to providing forms 1099 and W-2 for employees, this version includes form 1041 for Trusts and Estates.

Including several articles and videos for guidance, TurboTax for Business is much like Home and Business. Both versions provide you with both the Depreciation Expert and the "Tax Savvy for Small Business" tax guide.

If there's anything wrong with TurboTax, it could be that the software provides too much guidance. With videos, articles and offers of help at every turn, both versions hold your hand very tightly.

Liane Gouthro, a former technology reporter at PCWorld.com freelances from her home in Brookline, Massacbusetts.

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ASHBY de la Zouch in the English county of Leicestershire is not served by passenger trains, but that has not prevented it from having a railway station. Ashby Park is in fact located on a factory floor where Transmitton, an asset management company, has created a mock station to demonstrate one of its most promising products, integrated station management (ISM).

Transmitton, like the industry it serves, is in transition, and ISM is one of a portfolio of network management software products that could help it expand into continental Europe and beyond. The portfolio also includes network management (traction power control) and customer information systems (CIS). "What we are selling is asset management solutions, involving converting data into information, and information into action," said Mr Andy Baum, the company's business development manager.

The transitional state stems from two factors--the shrinking of the core business of traction power control in Britain and the trauma of being caught up in the financial and trading problems of its former parent company, Industrial Control Services (ICS). This latter situation led to the venture capital company, Alchemy, taking over Transmitton in August 2000, one month before ICS was de-listed from the London stock exchange.

Alchemy, which normally works towards turning a company around in four or five years and then selling it on, began the process at Transmitton, 55% of whose staff are graduate engineers, by calling a halt to some expensive ventures abroad. These included Line 1 of the Beijing Metro, for which Transmitton supplied the traction power supervisory control and data acquisition (Scada) system.

This coincided with a contraction of the core business following completion of an [pounds sterling]8.5 million electrical control room centralisation project for Britain's London-Scotland East Coast Main Line (ECML)--involving a monitoring and control system from a control room in York, with a second bank of screens at Transmitton's Ashby de la Zouch headquarters to check on progress. Transmitton would like to offer this system in the rest of Europe.

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