When to Start Using a Project/Task Management System Like Manymoon

Many people often wonder when it’s time to start using a project and task management system like Manymoon to keep track of their lives or work. Our experience in the space has coalesced into a fairly simple answer: When the amount of information becomes complex enough that you can no longer keep track of it in your head.

Your brain is the fastest information retrieval system you have. If you remember and organize all your tasks in your head, then using a management system will probably only slow you down, as you have to enter and then look up the information.

However, when you get to the point where you can no longer remember everything you need to do, or keep it organized in terms of steps or timeline, then the advantages of using a management system begin to far outweigh the costs. This also applies when you need to collaborate with others, who, much to your dismay, can’t read your mind.

This threshold is different for each one of us, but you’ll know when you get there. If you find yourself forgetting important tasks, feeling generally overwhelmed and unorganized, or having trouble communicating with coworkers (hello email deluge and document version chaos), then it’s time to get a system in place. We, of course, recommend Manymoon. If you haven’t signed up yet – try it out with a free account.

Tax Preparation Tips for Small Business

Manymoon Business Tips is an opportunity for us to share some of our favorite tips and solutions for small business–resources we think can help you be more productive.

Today’s post is written by Outright.com, a free accounting solution for small businesses recommended by BusinessWeek and the Wall Street Journal. Outright reminds us that while it may be the holiday season, it is not too early to start thinking about taxes–especially if you are self-employed!  Below, they offer tips for managing your taxes so it’s not so arduous when tax time comes.

In addition, Outright was kind of enough to organize these items into a Manymoon project template called Small Biz Prepare for Tax Time.  It includes the tasks and documents you need to get organized and prepared for 2010 taxes.  Visit the Manymoon Template Gallery (login, click Create Project > Show Options > Template Gallery) to get started and use the project template for your own business!

Taxes?!  It’s December!

We know many Manymoon users are managing small businesses, or working independently as contractors or consultants.  Like it or not, being in business for yourself means giving the government it’s share.  Every self-employed U.S. citizen has to file a Schedule C with their income taxes and you have to pay taxes four times a year (Surprise!).

Outright.com will free you from accounting, calculating those estimated taxes, preparing your Schedule C, and helping to identify deductions. Here’s what you should consider, and why we’re bringing up taxes four months before April 15th.

Top 10 Tips to Get Ready for Tax Season

1. Stay on top of your income as well as expenses. With the advent of online banking, few balance a checkbook anymore, and therefore knowing where your money goes is more critical than ever. Accurate record keeping delivers insight into your best customers, ensures the accuracy of records, helps you find deductions and save money, and goes well beyond getting you ready for tax season by watching everything.  Outright can automate this for you, by directly pulling transactions for banks, credit cards, PayPal, and more… so your business finances are always tracked and ready for tax time.
2. Categorize expenses. This is where things can be a challenge, but a little time spent is well worth the effort. Categorizing your income (for the most part, all “Sales”) is not nearly as critical as those deductible expenses. The Schedule C you have to file has pre-defined categories which, though they can be confusing, make a difference if used correctly. For example, keeping track of Mileage as  “Car and Truck Expenses” makes your time spent in the car on business deductible, while labeling it as “Other Expenses,” perhaps because you have own system or don’t know how to keep track of mileage, would relegate it to something you can’t write off.  Use a service, like Outright, that does most of the categorization automatically for you. When in doubt, ask a professional or hire a bookkeeper.
3. Speaking of mileage. Let’s reiterate that you should be recording all the time spent in the car.  On Outright.com we have freelancers who deduct thousands of dollars in mileage.  You can deduct $.50 for every mile driven for business in 2010.
4. Even phone calls can be deductions. Any business-related calls or expenses incurred in your home are deductible (Yay! There’s something). Highlight each business-related call on your monthly bills. At the end of the year, tally up the cost from the 12 bills and deduct 100%. Office supplies, furniture, and certainly technology like a new computer or printer all qualify as well. The rules can get tricky so stick with this mantra: Record the expenses so you don’t miss out, and when in doubt, ask a professional.
5. Organize your home office space to take a home office deduction. If you use a part of your home exclusively and regularly as your principal place of business or to meet with clients or customers, you should qualify. Use tax software or an advisor to calculate the deduction; your job, this year, is to consider your use of space and make sure the opportunity isn’t missed.
6. Keep an eye on your profit and loss. Take a look at your profit and loss statement for the previous year. Do the numbers this year seem reasonable? Search your pockets for receipts, don’t neglect that credit card that was canceled, and keep in mind that payment to your brother for some consulting.
7. Pay those estimated taxes. You have to pay taxes four times a year, each payment based on an estimate of what you’ll ultimately owe for the year. To avoid penalties, be sure you’ve paid enough at each estimated tax deadline. It can be confusing because the dates these payments are due change and the amount you owe varies based on your tax obligation.  A simple way to start is to pay 1/4th of the amount you actually owed last year. Food for thought: the interest penalty for not paying your estimated taxes is around 4% of what you owe – some might consider that better than a loan.
8. Prepare a budget for next year. Don’t want to bother with the hassle of budgeting? It’s worth it. The quick way to get one done is to take that previous profit and loss statement and download it to a spreadsheet. There you can easily add some formulas to evaluate, say, an increase in sales next year by 10% or reduction in costs by 5%.  In Outright.com, just look at the P&L from last year and reset for this.
9. Stay focused on your paying clients! The success of your business has far less to do with bookkeeping or accounting than this single priority. Don’t put a single thought to business plans, licenses, or whether or not you should incorporate — keep clients coming in the door. Once there, delight them! Happy customers are the greatest sales and marketing channels of all time. They do a far better job of selling your talent to new clients than you could ever do yourself. Keep them happy and absorb the costs of dealing with those that are disappointed or frustrated, and they will pay off exponentially. How can we possibly make this a priority when it comes to dealing with taxes?  Great question, it’s exactly what Outright.com allows; we’ll take care of everything else so you can stay focused on your clients.
10. Get out there and talk with other small business owners. One, sharing tips and tricks will make you each smarter and better. Two, it’s a great way to get referrals. Three, and most importantly, you’re going to need a support network of people who have been in your shoes. Sure, social networking sites are fun, and yes, you should be on Facebook, Twitter, and Outright’s community, but it’s also useful to have people you can talk to about your challenges, people who understand where you’re coming from and what you’re going through.

Bottom line?  Get organized to save yourself headaches when it comes time to prepare your taxes, save some money by getting them right, and make working for yourself simple.  While Manymoon is helping you run your business, Outright.com will help you free yourself from the accounting.

And finally, remember that Outright created a Manymoon project template to facilitate all of the above advice.  It includes the tasks and documents you need to get organized and prepared for 2010 taxes. Visit the Manymoon Template Gallery (login, click Create Project > Show Options > Template Gallery > look for a template called “Small Biz Prepare for Tax Time”) to get started and use the project template for your own business!

Manymoon makes Email Better (and lots, lots less)

One of our goals here at Manymoon is to help make email more useful in collaboration, but also to greatly reduce the volume of email our users produce. Because as we all know, once a project gets beyond a certain minimal complexity, email becomes a pretty inefficient collaboration tool.

Here’s a great article that shows that our approach is working.

Calling All Google Apps Admins

Add Manymoon to your Google Apps account–it’s FREE:

Here’s why:

We here at Manymoon love Google Apps. But we also know that Google Apps can be an even more complete and powerful solution when you add Manymoon. Google Apps gives you great tools to create and share information–Docs, Gmail, Calendar, Sites–but it doesn’t provide a way to organize all your information once it grows beyond a certain complexity.

Enter Manymoon. By allowing you to create projects, tasks and events, and assign them to colleagues, you can take charge of your information overload. And since Manymoon integrates seamlessly with Google Apps, you can link Google Docs to your tasks, turn gmails into tasks or projects, and have your task and project due dates show up automatically on your Google Calendar.

By adding Manymoon to your Google Apps domain, you immediately get:

• Instant integration with Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Sites.
• The Gmail gadget, which allows you to turn emails directly into Manymoon tasks.
• And of course, Manymoon’s industry-leading social project management capabilities.

For more information, and to read about Manymoon success stories, please click here.

Questions? Click here.

Or just go for it:

Manymoon Tips Contest. Win a $100 Amazon Gift Certificate!

One thing we love here at Manymoon is that our users come up with all sorts of great, innovative ways to use Manymoon.  So we’re running a Tips contest.

To enter the contest, just write up your tip here.

Here’s the challenge: Submit a Tip that will help others become more productive with Manymoon! It could be an explanation of how you use Manymoon to streamline the work you do every week, or how you used Manymoon to accomplish a one-time goal, like planning an annual event. The more specific you are, the better. Describe how you use projects, tasks, templates etc to accomplish your goals.

We’ll pick the best Tip and the winner will receive a $100 Amazon gift certificate. Two second-place winners will receive $25 gift certificates each.

Good luck!!

Introducing the Manymoon Support Universe

Here at Manymoon, providing excellent customer support is a top priority. We’re striving to reduce the time it takes you to find answers and removing the main bottleneck – ourselves – should help! You can always submit a ticket for one-on-one support, but our new support tools and community will provide an immediate resolution to most of your questions.

We’re excited to announce the Manymoon Support Universe!  It’s been grouped into three areas:

KnowledgeBase

The KnowledgeBase is an instruction manual categorized by Manymoon feature, with most of the entries written as questions, to give it a FAQ feel. This forum is completely created and curated by Manymoon staff. It’s a great reference manual or a way to investigate a specific topic in detail. Want to learn everything there is know about Tags?  Just go to the appropriate section in the KnowledgeBase and find out!

We  include screenshots, links and videos in our articles to create clear and compelling KnowledgeBase entries.

We’ll be adding items to our KnowledgeBase organically based on feedback from you. In other words, when a question repeatedly appears for a certain feature, we’ll add an entry to the KnowledgeBase. We’re still growing our KnowledgeBase–we plan to add lots more articles within next couple of months.

User Forums

User Forums are where users and Manymoon staff can create interactive threads of conversation. The first two forums, “Help, I need somebody, help!” and “General Questions” are set up to allow users to post questions. Others users can comment on the questions, and Manymoon staff can mark particularly good answers with a big checkmark. Entries in these forums are created as “Questions”, which have a question mark icon next to them, and indicate they are meant to be interactive threads.

The third forum is called “Tips and Tricks“, and allows Manymoon users to post articles on how they use Manymoon to get super-productive. In fact, we are currently running a contest to see who can post the best article in Tips and Tricks, with Amazon gift certificates for the top three tips! Click here for more information on the contest.

Feature Requests and General Feedback

This is one of the coolest parts of the Support Universe!  The “Feature Request” forum allows users to post their requests for new features to be added to Manymoon. Other users can scan the existing feature requests and vote for the ones they want. Entries in Feature Request are created as “Ideas”, and have a little lightbulb icon next to them.

Finally, the “General Feedback” forum is for all other feedback that is not a feature request.

We hope this introduction to our new support universe has been interesting. In later blog posts I’ll talk about how to get some momentum going for the forums, so users are actively using and adding to them.

What do you think of the new Manymoon Support Universe?

Save the World & Boost your Productivity: 5 Tips for Creating a Paperless Office

At Manymoon we know there are obvious economical and environmental benefits in reducing the amount of paper we use, but we also think going paperless can boost productivity and efficiency.  Here are some of our favorite ways to reduce paper (while increasing productivity!).  Please comment below and share more of your ideas and tips!

1.  Use the Cloud, Not The Filing Cabinet
Does your team print and store important documents in filing cabinets?  Instead of printing them out and filing them away, save them online!  Using online documents like Google Docs makes it easy to share and access your documents from anywhere, and offers version control–the latest version of the doc is always online.  Storage sites like Manymoon and Box.net offer data redundancy and frequent back-ups, keeping your documents safer online than in any offline storage unit.  Your documents will be easier to retrieve, neatly organized and you’ll rest assured that important documents are available when you need them.

2.  Make Electronic To-do Lists
We find to-do lists extremely helpful in managing our lives…but often found ourselves with multiple written to-do lists..easily lost and not extremely reliable.  Now instead of written lists, we create tasks in Manymoon–allowing us to set reminders and deadlines for ourselves.  Manymoon also sends you daily e-mail reminders of your tasks due each day to eliminate the need for keeping a written “task list” at your desk.  Plus, with Manymoon you can assign tasks to others, without having to write it down.  You’ll still get that great buzz from crossing tasks off your list–and be able to keep yourself even more accountable!

3.  E-signatures Are Quicker and Easier
Need to get signatures on invoices, forms or contracts?  Don’t bother with printing and faxing–use e-signatures instead.  E-signatures allow you to send documents to recipients, and lets them sign and respond completely electronically.  No paper needed, plus quicker turn-around.  We’ve found Echo Sign, another app in the Google Apps Marketplace, to be a great tool.

4.  Ditch Hand-Outs in Meetings
Instead of creating printed hand-outs for your next meeting, use a screen and projector or encourage your team to bring laptops for viewing documents.  We’ve found that our team is more attentive when looking at a shared screen, and we love that we no longer have stray packets of printed hand-outs left in meeting rooms only to be tossed in the recycling minutes after a meeting ends.  Digital meeting hand-outs also mean you don’t have to worry about outdated versions of your content getting into the wrong hands–everyone will be working off the same (most-recent) document!

5.  Business Cards Are So 1990
Instead of exchanging business cards, send quick emails and immediately connect via LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.  Connecting via social networks allows for an exchange of more information, keeps your contacts’ information current, and you’re less apt to lose contacts (like you currently do with those pesky business cards).

We want more of your tips–please add them as comments below!  1st and 3rd responses get 1 GB additional Manymoon storage free!

Get More Done with Manymoon: Tackle Any Project in 3 Easy Steps

At any given time, you probably have several things swirling around your head; projects for work or home, things you have to do, things you can’t forget.  Manymoon can help you make order of your chaos, giving you the tools necessary to make you and your teams more effective.

Follow these 3 steps and start getting more done:

1.   Create a Project
What do you want to achieve?  Set up a new project based on this objective.  A project can be anything from developing a presentation to organizing your next PTA meeting.  And don’t worry about trying to plan and document the entire project up-front.  With Manymoon you can create the project in seconds and then add to it as things pop into your mind (e.g. people to invite, a document to add, tasks to complete).

Here are some ideas for projects:

• Manage weekly meetings by assigning action items and tracking them towards completion of the project.
• Plan events or vacations by creating tasks for all the specific event details and to-do’s, like “Send invitations” or “Purchase tickets”.  Save documents or links in one organized place, accessible from anywhere.
  
• Prepare for a presentation and assign tasks to people who need to provide you with information. Create one task for yourself to create the presentation and another for a co-worker to attend the dry-run.
• Track a sales opportunity by creating a task to setup the initial sales meeting, a task for the customer to provide their requirements and a task for you to provide a proposal. Learn more.

2.   Assign Tasks
Within your Project, think about all the things you, and others, need to do in order to accomplish the objective and assign tasks for each item.  Your project tasks are automatically shared with any other members in the project, but you can also create private tasks if you like.  You may also assign deadlines to tasks to help keep everyone on track. You’ll receive reminders when tasks are due.

Milestones are also available so you can organize your tasks into groups that make the most sense to you.  It’s as simple as dragging & dropping tasks into the appropriate group.  This is a great way to break up large, difficult projects into smaller, manageable groups.

3.  Work with Others and Get More Done!
In addition to assigning tasks, Manymoon makes it easy to share information, updates and calendars with your team.  Every project has a Project Bulletin, where you can see all recent activity for that project, keeping everyone on the same page. Share calendars, documents, links with ease and know that you all working on the latest version of drafts. Everyone can contribute to tasks by adding comments.  Or, you can send email notifications to the group to request specific feedback on projects or tasks. Inviting your contacts to Manymoon is easy and free.  Learn more.

We’d love to hear your ideas on getting started with projects in Manymoon.  Please share your ideas and comments here.