What are the advantages and disadvantages of purchasing a vehicle for our business (S Corporation) as opposed to a regular purchase?

In the past year or so we have encountered tons of problems with Gusto. The worst one was to terminate some of our team members' benefits (for unknown reasons) and they were so backed up that it took them 6-8 weeks to finally have us in front of their waiting queue (so I had to intervene and worked with insurance carriers on my own to get it resolved). ADP made the comment that Gusto essentially gets the brokerage fees without actually providing brokerage services.

So I'm shopping for the switch for a bit. I recently received a quote from ADP and the pricing are very comparable because they are a partner with the bank we do business with. However.....they do not have the expense management nor the time off management (request/approval button and get pulled directly into payroll). So that means we will have to keep track of expenses and people's time off request every month and manually enter into payroll. These two functions are built into Gusto so we loved that.

I wonder if anyone has any experience how to make this easier if we do make the switch. I am worried this will add tedious work to our admin person (who is unfortunately slow).

Thoughts appreciated! thank you!

Hello Reddit,

To start, a couple years ago I was given an LED neon beer sign. It was made from acrylic and had LED light strips.

I posted it on Facebook to see if anyone would be interested. It got 5k views and 208 messages.

Would it be smarter to just buy the sign I had cheap on Amazon, temu, AliExpress with the “custom” ones.

Or make them myself.

Also, if you have any recommendations on Reddit groups to join, please lmk!

I run a small home bakery and I’m looking for packaging items such as cake boxes, cupcake boxes (as big as 24 cupcakes all the way through as small as 2 cupcakes), cookie bags, plastic dessert cups, ect. I’m wanting ones that are cute/ have windows and are NOT from Amazon or Uline.

Does anyone have a go-to store they use? Preferably a small business. Thanks!

What is the favorite small biz software for keeping track of purchase, sales, expenses and other things to keep it in line for tax season. My husband’s online vinyl record sales earned us a 1099-k this year and I’d like to be ready for next year.

Being told by my local branch Chase does not add TOD or beneficiaries to Business accounts, but Chase customer service is telling me they do and can only do it in branch?

Has anyone done this or can confirm one way or the other?

I recently started a business with my partner, who was a lead engineer in designing the Fitbit about 10 years ago. We build custom tools to help businesses run smoother and waste less time on tedious tasks.

There’s so much advice out there—LinkedIn, social media, cold calling, referrals—but I’d rather hear from people who’ve actually done it. What’s actually worked for you to land solid, long-term clients? What was a total waste of time?

Appreciate any insight, just tryna figure this stuff out.

I am looking at renting a space for my business but every once in a while we get pallet deliveries. A location I'm looking at has a loading dock, which is handy, but the loading dock has 67 feet of clearance in front of it. Is that enough space for a 50 ft semi to back into it?

Here's an overhead view of the parking lot

Does it seem feasible that a semi could back a trailer up to the loading dock? It seems at least plausible that someone driving a semi could jack knife a trailer and park it at the loading dock? Also, in my experience, some truck drivers are fantastic whereas some are less than stellar. Would I have issues with a space like this with getting deliveries if some truck divers are inexperienced?

Thanks

When I started my business, I expected things like managing cash flow and marketing to be tough but it’s the unexpected challenges that really throw me off.

For example, I never realized how much time I’d spend chasing down late payments, figuring out weird tax rules, or dealing with customers who ghost after asking a million questions. Some days, it feels like half my job is just putting out fires I never saw coming.

For those of you running a business, what’s something you didn’t expect to be such a challenge? What caught you off guard the most? Would love to hear your experiences!

Hi all,

I’m looking for a side hustle and I think I found a niche I make sense in but I wanted to get feedback from small business owners.

I working as a writer full time, but have a background in social media, photography, videography, and graphic design. I grew up on an island known for its historic charm that is filled with small businesses and antique stores. Most of these places don’t have anything other than a Facebook account and half the time it hasn’t been updated in years.

I’d like to offer my services as an on site social media coordinator. I would come to the store and get photos, videos, interviews, do educational reels about the history of certain items for sale or of the building the store is in, so vendor spotlights if it’s an emporium style shop, etc. I’d offer to edit and post on their Facebook and instagram accounts with the purpose of increasing their following and brand presence, while legitimizing their business as one that’s important to preserving the history of the island (it’s a big part of the culture).

I’d do an introductory offer of $300/month for three months and then increase to 500/month with discounts if you sign on for at least 6 months. There would be scheduled posts every day (this is one of my greatest talents, I can make something out of anything) and I’d offer limited engagement with the audience as well.

Many of the owners are older and might not understand the benefits a social media following can have on their business, so I was hoping to incentivize it in a way that translates easier to dollars gained. like if you’re an emporium for example, you rent out a booth to a vendor and they pay a monthly fee, as the owner you incentivize people to rent a spot at your shop knowing that it comes with a social media coordinator that can help promote their business.

The island is also home to many museums and event rental spaces that don’t have any social media presence, so I’d also be interested in reaching out to those places but the fee structure would probably be different…

As small business owners, is this something y’all would see value in?

P.S. even though I work full time as a writer, my company only expects me to work 15 or so hours a week (long story) so I have time to do this well.

currently we are using quotient which is great for one company[i now have 7 logins lol] but it cant differentiate. I own a Marketing company so need to send quotes out for multiple companies ideally with there logo and a way to organize each organization.

Any suggestions would be great, was looking at PandaDoc as a possibility so if anyones used it any results their would be great!

What businesses do you have and how do you get revenue?

I am wanting to open up a business that will provide counseling and consulting services. When thinking about how to properly market and name my business I am torn between whether to name it "... counseling and consulting" or "... counseling & consulting." The reason I am torn is because I am thinking about the web address, business bank accounts (credit card), ease of searching for it online, etc. and wondering if the "&" will make me run into any issues down the line. Any recommendations or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Picked up a Canadian client. We can't do E Trasfers.

Figuring out best way and of course cheapest.

Monthly payment of a few thousand dollars.

Looking at Remitley.

Other Recommendations?

Any other insight?

For me, any additional increase in tariffs for goods imported from China would be crippling. Is anyone else experiencing the same concern?

Hello
I m becoming the CEO of a small-medium medical practice in France. I know nothing about it, the previous ceo left and principal owner told me I needed to fire X people and that we need to make lots of reforms. Do you have any advices on running a medical (chirurgical) practice? Seems to have a lot of problems

Hello! My business has recently needed to move away from absorbing the fees that are tacked on with any credit card purchase. We are a B to B offset and digital print company, and some of our invoices were getting too large to absorb the roughly 3% of invoices when a client decided to pay via CC. We do not force our clients to pay via CC, we offer them the ability to pay debit, by check with net 30 approved terms, or ACH. We believe the flexibility to avoid the fee is important, however there are those that still insist on paying via CC. I get it there are a lot of protections that come with this methodology.

Our strategy instead of just blanket increasing our prices by 3% was to make sure we did not punish everyone to manage our runaway fee costs.

That being said we have had a hard time finding a credit card processing company that will allow us to add the 3% cost to our invoices, and create an easy enough to use web interface for charging cards and generating receipts.

Our goal is to find a way to send to clients the ability to make a credit card payment online. Via a payment link or portal that will securely take the information, and charge the card for the funds needed on an invoice.

The problem we have been facing is my AR can create a link to pay for a specific invoice, however she is not alerted via email or notifications that someone has paid for an invoice this way, we were hoping for some sort of instant alert so we can clear a payment and then either finish a product for a client or release it for delivery if it is considered CoD.

The other issue is if my AR can make a specific invoice payment link, our clients do not get an instant receipt on their paying causing us to need to do another touch point of generating that to send to them.

Before all of this we had a very easy to use payment portal system for people to make payments, get receipts, and even alerted our AR so actions can be done to release a product for clients. Their big stoppage was the 3% fee, they said we were not allowed to add it to credit card payments beginning this whole process.

Does anyone deal with anything similar? We are open to paying for a credit card processing firm for these features, just need to be able to include the 3%

Thanks yall!

Hello! I'm looking for software to run sales and service business. I program automatic inspection machines sold as a per-hour service and sell fixtures I build to hold parts in the machine. It's not complicated, and I don't have a ton of customers.

In a past life, I have used: Oracle, JobBoss, RealTrac, quickbooks, and Sage. I spent a ton of time trying out ERPNext via Frappe cloud server, and it was not a great experience. I see a lot of potential there, but I need to focus on the customer, not debugging my customer management. I don't like all the work-arounds I had to do in Sage, though it's decent software. I like Quickbooks, but it's missing a lot.

My biggest pain point is managing customer and vendor data: creating a job, associating documents with that job, tracking work done on it, and being able to assess whether we made any money are what I'm after. I don't need payroll, website connection, sales management, inventory management, etc. I need lite CRM, document management, and enough accounting to make due, ideally something an accountant is going to like dealing with. Is this obviously Quickbooks? Any add-ons I should be investigating?

I run a small business, and I regularly get customers who ask a question about a product and immediately follow up with, ‘Do you have a discount code?’

We don’t really do discount codes because we price everything as fairly as possible for everyone. If I were just handing out discounts to anyone who asked, I might as well just lower the price, right?

I get that big companies throw out discounts all the time, but as a small business, every sale counts. It just feels weird when people expect one without any reason.

What do you think? Do you also find it a bit frustrating, or am I overthinking it?

Can Anyone Donate an Idea. Student, Serial Entrepreneurs, investors and myself r struggling with it. Maybe next big idea come out of your pain point. Who knows?

How do you guys gather potential client info at live events? Is there an app/website that can collect name/email/phone number? I would like to have it digital, some people have sloppy handwriting and it would eliminate guessing what they wrote down. Preferably free or super affordable(cheap). Thank in advance for any helpful info.

I have 5 clients that have asked to be billed by hourly rate for my services. I am finidng this to be quite an annoying task especially when more diverse work is being asigned.

So my question is is there and AI time tracking tool that can actually identify the task you are working on , and the clients you are working for, with an addition of creating an invoice for each client end of the month baded on the task tracked?

Hope that made any sense.

Any help is appretiated!

I have recently opened my Etsy shop and have some visitors but other than 2 of my friends I had no sales. My business is crochet and knitting pieces. This is the link to my shop: https://nazdezignboutique.etsy.com/ I was wondering if someone could tell me what they think I'm doing weong or I can improve. Thanks

What are your opinions on AI agents in the future? Mark Zuckerberg believes that every thriving business, similar to how they have an email address now, will have a personal AI agent.

Thoughts everyone?!?!

I may be hiring an independent sales rep who lives in Canada (I’m in the US). If he were a US citizen, he’d be a 1099 employee. How does it work since he lives in Canada? Do I need to do any special reporting? Will he be just a 1099 or something else?

My wife and I along with a business partner own a couple of auto shops. My wife and I have day jobs and do not take salaries from the business. We simply take distributions from time to time depending on how the business is doing. Our business partner runs the shops and gets a full salary plus his share of distributions when we do them.

We operate as and S corp, with my wife and I each owning 40.5% and our business partner owning 19%.

We are trying to find a way to structure part of the distributions towards pre-tax retirement.

Since we are taxed on the full amount of the business profits even if we don't do distributions, we typically review what the tax impact is and distribute at least enough to cover the extra taxes. We've tried to avoid draining our cash so distributions are minimal.

Since retirement plans are based on eligible wages (w2) is there a way to push our profits towards a pre tax plan?

So for example... we profit $100k, we only distribute $20k...can part of that $20k go to a retirement account to reduce our profit and tax liability?

Thanks!

So I’m thinking of starting a jewellery small business on Etsy.Im wondering if im using bubble mailers as packaging and I’m wondering if I have to get a sticker printer and print the address to my customer on if aswell as my address? And do I have to print out the address or will my local post office do it for reference I live in Ireland if that makes any difference?

Hey everyone,

I’m a solopreneur handling sales and marketing on my own, and I’m looking for a CRM that doesn’t require constant manual input. I run a very niche business that only has about 3,000 actionable leads.

My sales process is pretty straightforward:

• Cold Engagement – Reaching out to new leads.
• Warm Engagement – Following up with people I’ve interacted with.
• Brand Awareness – Keeping current clients engaged.
• General Marketing – Automating outreach and nurturing leads.

I’ve used Zoho CRM, but the learning curve was steep, and I found myself spending too much time manually inputting data instead of actually selling. I need something that automates as much as possible, from lead qualification to engagement, so I can focus on meetings and calls.

A few things I’m looking for:
✅ AI-powered lead scoring & engagement (email/SMS automation preferred)
✅ Minimal manual data entry (I don’t have time to babysit a CRM)
✅ Easy-to-use and not overly complex (I don’t want to take a course to use it)
✅ Good automation & integrations (without needing Zapier for everything)
✅ Pipeline tracking that makes sense for solo sales & marketing

I’ve also noticed that a lot of people seem to hate GoHighLevel, so I’d love to hear alternatives from anyone who’s found a CRM that actually works for a solo business owner without requiring a ton of setup and maintenance.

Any recommendations? Would love to hear from people who have been in the same boat. I'm willing to spend some money on set up but after that I want it to be 'mostly hands off'.

Thanks in advance!

Started a new, single member LLC. Is Quickbooks really necessary? Can I be effective using an excel spreadsheet?

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