This is it. You are on your own – no longer an employee, but a small business owner or a freelancer. It’s exciting and scary at the same time. Finally, you get to do all things you wanted to and fulfill your dreams. On the other hand, job security gets a whole new meaning.

There are many advantages about being a business owner, and some disadvantages, as well.  Here’s a quick look at what to expect.

Pros

1. You are your own boss - No more annoying authoritative figure that hovers over you all day long. No need to pretend you respect a person that’s a total failure. No one to boss you around but yourself.
2. Flexible time - You set your own meetings, there’s not set time in which you need to get up and get to the office, and you can decide when you’ve had enough work for the day.
3. No office politics and quarrels - No more fighting about where to go to lunch, or what music you can hear in the open space. You are now master of your domain and get to decide how things are done.
4. Lower expenses - If you are working from home, which a lot of small business owners are, then you save a lot of money on commuting, eating out and formal clothing.
5. Choosing your clients – As an employee in a company, you pretty much take the clients given to you, no questions asked. As a business owner, you get to choose those you want to work with. You can even choose NOT to work with a specific client, if you consider them to be too much trouble.

Cons

1. Income isn’t a sure thing - When you were on a salary, paid by someone else, you basically knew how much you earned each month, and could plan your budget accordingly. As a freelance or a small business owner, income depends on the amount of projects you have and your own marketing efforts. Being independent means that you have periods of feast or famine, and you have to be prepared for that.
2. The work day is never really over - Although your time is much more flexible now, you can still find yourself working late hours and answering phone calls on the weekends. You will find yourself thinking about work and projects a lot more than when you were an employee.
3. You can’t slack around - There’s no one to take the blame for you when a project isn’t finished on time. You have to have a work discipline and finish your tasks on time – and there’s no one to tell you to do that. It’s not easy to avoid distractions and procrastination, but you have to do it anyway.
4. Bureaucracy -  Meet the authorities! Now you don’t have a choice and you have to deals with aspects of bureaucracy you’ve never met before. Hiring an accountant or a lawyer might help, but you can’t always afford it and many times you’ll have to deal with the authorities yourself.
5. You can’t stop marketing yourself - It’s not easy to sell yourself, but you have to do it. Basically, you have to do it all the time, because you need to make sure you have a constant flow of projects to insure an income. A lot of people find this task problematic and difficult. There are many ways to market yourself these days, with the help of the internet, and it’s easier than it used to be. Still, you can’t stop marketing yourself when you own your own business.

Running a business isn’t easy. You have to work hard, be efficient and do many things yourself, to cut on costs – especially if you are a freelance or running a small business.

There are many internet sites that can help you run your business more smoothly. Here are some of the best financial management tools online.

#1

FreshBooks is a very popular site for online invoicing. Using this site, you can send and manage all of your invoices online, track expenses, re-bill clients and even manage your accounting issues through the site. The site is free to try, and it’s very successful among freelancers and small business managers.

#2

BillMyClients.com is a very good invoicing and billing service. Whether you’d like to do it yourself or have them do it for you, it’s an optimal billing solution.

The site’s most popular plan allows you to quickly and easily create and send an unlimited number of detailed invoices to your clients via e-mail for $11.99 per month. For an additional fee, they’ll send a hard copy to your client via the US Postal Service as well.

#3

Zoho Invoice is a very useful, low cost invoicing system. With this site, you can create, send and track invoices, deal with foreign currencies in quotes and invoices, use their invoice templates, and run reports on your activity.

A basic account, with 5 invoices per month, is absolutely free. The basic plan, which allows for 25 invoices per month, costs $8.

#4

Bill4Time is a time tracking software, designed to handle time and expense tracking and billing, project management, document filing and scheduling for firms who bill for their time.

The Bill4Time software helps you get more organized, be more productive, and bill more time. It has features like remote access, backups, security, and automated e-mail alerts.

#5

XE Currency Converter

This is a rather basic financial tool, but can really come in handy if you are working with foreign currency.

Exchange rates fluctuate a lot, so it’s a good idea to have a resource like this handy for a quick calculation before sending out a quote or bill a client. XE is free to use, which is also a great advantage.

Web applications make our lives easier – they can be accessed from almost anywhere, they are usually cheap or free and they are mostly very easy to use.

Using good web apps can really help you save time, money and effort. If you are a small business owner, web apps can turn things around for you, and enable you access to very sophisticated management tools and other aids.

2009 presented us with some marvelous web applications. We picked 10 of them for you to take a look and enjoy.

10 Great Web Applications – 2009

1. PhotoSnack - PhotoSnack offers a great and easy way to create slideshows. This web app lets you create photo slideshows and online photo galleries for free, and also offers you multiple ways of sharing and publishing your photo slideshows.
2. Adobe BrowserLab - This useful tool from Adobe is designed to make the life of web developers much easier – with it, you can preview and test your webpages on leading browsers and operating systems – on demand. You get full screenshots and can customize your test settings.
3. Office Live - This Microsoft web service enables you to store up to 5GB, share with anyone, and collaborate on a single document. You can view Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint files from your Web browser.
4. DimDim - A free web conferencing service,  that lets everyone everywhere to communicate using rich media in real time. Dimdim is easy to use and completely free, so web meetings are made available to everyone.
5. Color Scheme Designer - A wonderful tool for designers and web developers. This web app has increased precision and color space conversions, better preview, enhanced scheme creation system, unique scheme IDs and permanent URL of the scheme.
6. PDF to Excel - A very useful conversion tool. Use PDF to Excel to quickly and easily create highly-editable XLS files, making it a cinch to re-use tables and spreadsheets from PDF files in Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice, Google Docs, and WordPerfect Office.
7. Creatly - A tool for creating online diagrams. Create fast, professional looking diagrams with Creately‘s large library of objects and easy start templates. Now you can draw anything easily.
8. 247Webmonitoring - Even if you have the best hosting service, you need to keep an eye on your site’s up-time. This web app will monitor your website 24X7 from their servers and notify you whenever your site goes down, so that you can quickly address the issue and keep your customers happy.
9. Preezo - If you can’t afford PowerPoint, this is the solution for you. Preezo enables you to create professional quality presentations using an ultra-fast Ajax user interface.
10. Live Mesh - With Live Mesh, you can synchronize files with all of your devices, so you always have the latest versions handy. Access your files from any device or from the web, easily share them with others, and get notified whenever someone changes a file. Very useful for people who are always on the go.

Few would argue that the primary goals of a virtual PBX are to provide a small business owner with a professional telephone answering service and to reduce the costs associated with other useful telephone services. But in developing and marketing today’s virtual office services, many companies have masked these fundamental goals by offering a laundry list of ‘fantastic’ features that may detract consumers from determining which services they really need. As savvy consumers and business owners, however, it is our obligation to see through these marketing ploys, so that we don’t overpay for services we really won’t use.

Still, while many virtual PBX features may seem extraneous, there are some ‘extras’ that can be surprisingly useful. Here are 5 virtual office features that can contribute greatly to the professionalism and efficiency of any small business.

1. Call recording. Even if you think that you’ll never need to record a call, you may be amazed at how useful this feature can be when making verbal agreements- and making sure that they are implemented properly.
2. Calling cards. You may not be traveling a lot (or at all) for business right now, but even for the once a year that you go on vacation, having the ability to use your virtual PBX service from anywhere can really be useful, and can save you money on your travel phone bills.
3. Call logs. While you may not be concerned about using your call logs to keep track of your minute usage, call logs can be useful for looking up lost or misplaced phone number of people that have called in- or that you’ve called and need to contact again.
4. Call handling rules. Sure, it’s nice to forget about work when you’re away from your desk. Unfortunately, small business owners often don’t have that luxury, as a missed call can mean lost business. When set up properly on your virtual PBX, call handling rules enable you to reroute your business calls to your cell phone, your home phone, or any other phone that you desire, so that you are always available when your clients need you.
5. Email and SMS voicemail delivery. It may be easy to press the play button on your answering machine, but that requires standing near the machine. With email voicemail delivery, you can receive messages from your virtual office service wherever you have internet access, which is incredibly convenient for small business owners who don’t spend much time sitting at their desk.

IttyBiz has written an interesting post about Marketing for Small Businesses. Read the post, answer some of the questions and try to find the way to make the right decision for your business.

Here are some interesting question you should ask yourself:

1. What do I love to do so much that it doesn’t feel like work?
2. What could I write in my signature line that would make that person desperate to click my link or call my
   number?
3. What personality traits do I have going for me in my quest to help my right people?
4. What could I do to be interesting to the media?

Read the full post at IttyBiz

Few would argue that the primary goals of a virtual PBX are to provide a small business owner with a professional telephone answering service and to reduce the costs associated with other useful telephone services.  But in developing and marketing today’s virtual office services, many companies have masked these fundamental goals by offering a laundry list of ‘fantastic’ features that may detract consumers from determining which services they really need.  As savvy consumers and business owners, however, it is our obligation to see through these marketing ploys, so that we don’t overpay for services we really won’t use.

Still, while many virtual PBX features may seem extraneous, there are some ‘extras’ that can be surprisingly useful.  Here are 5 virtual office features that can contribute greatly to the professionalism and efficiency of any small business.

1. Call recording. Even if you think that you’ll never need to record a call, you may be amazed at how useful this feature can be when making verbal agreements- and making sure that they are implemented properly.
2. Calling cards. You may not be traveling a lot (or at all) for business right now, but even for the once a year that you go on vacation, having the ability to use your virtual PBX service from anywhere can really be useful, and can save you money on your travel phone bills.
3. Call logs. While you may not be concerned about using your call logs to keep track of your minute usage, call logs can be useful for looking up lost or misplaced phone number of people that have called in- or that you’ve called and need to contact again.
4. Call handling rules. Sure, it’s nice to forget about work when you’re away from your desk.  Unfortunately, small business owners often don’t have that luxury, as a missed call can mean lost business.  When set up properly on your virtual PBX, call handling rules enable you to reroute your business calls to your cell phone, your home phone, or any other phone that you desire, so that you are always available when your clients need you.
5. Email and SMS voicemail delivery. It may be easy to press the play button on your answering machine, but that requires standing near the machine.  With email voicemail delivery, you can receive messages from your virtual office service wherever you have internet access, which is incredibly convenient for small business owners who don’t spend much time sitting at their desk.