Business.com

This article is sponsored by Intuit. Invoice collections are usually treated as a follow-up problem. When the money comes in, that’s when someone starts chasing the client, and it can take some time before payment finally hits your account. According to Intuit QuickBooks’ 2026 Small Business Late Payments Report, 59 percent of small businesses are carrying invoices overdue by 30 days or more, up from 47 percent the year before, with an average of $17,700 outstanding.

This article is sponsored by Intuit. Small business owners have largely settled the question of whether AI belongs in the back office. The harder question is where to let it run unsupervised. In the Federal Reserve’s 2025 Small Business Credit Survey, 46 percent of small employer firms said they or their employees already use AI, and another 15 percent planned to start within the year.

This article is sponsored by Intuit. If you’ve been selling into other states for a while, there’s a good chance the rules governing your tax obligations have changed since you last checked. Economic nexus is the standard that determines whether a state can require you to collect and remit its sales tax even without a physical presence there, and these rules aren’t static.

This article is sponsored by Intuit. Switching accounting systems ranks near the top of the list of things small business owners put off. The fear makes sense, since these systems deal with a company’s most sensitive financial data, and a rushed migration could end up wrecking the books. Fortunately, that fate is entirely avoidable. A data migration that follows a deliberate sequence gives you multiple chances to catch a problem before it becomes permanent.

This article is sponsored by Intuit. You’ve gone through the reconciliation screen twice, and the difference between your books and your bank statement still won’t budge. Nothing about that number tells you where to look first, but the size and shape of the discrepancy usually do.

This article is sponsored by Northwest Registered Agent. Most new founders run into the same problem: the tasks required to launch a new business depend on each other, and doing them out of order creates extra work. Register a domain before you confirm the state will let you use the name, and you may end up with a web address that doesn’t match your legal entity. List your home address on a formation document, and it becomes a searchable public record you’ll need to file an amendment to change.

This article is sponsored by Northwest Registered Agent. Forming a limited liability company has never been simpler. In most states the filing itself is an online form that takes a few minutes to complete. And entrepreneurs take advantage of this fact: more than 5.6 million business applications were filed in the United States in 2025, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Filing is the easy part.

This article is sponsored by Northwest Registered Agent When you form an LLC or a corporation, you fill out a document that asks for a name and an address. It feels like a formality but the moment your state accepts that filing, the information on it becomes part of the permanent public record. That means it’s searchable by anyone and, in many states, available for purchase in bulk. One field on that form asks you to name a registered agent.

This article is sponsored by Northwest Registered Agent Starting a business means filling out forms, and nearly every one of them asks for an address. If you work from your kitchen table, the answer seems obvious. You type in your home address and move on. Weeks later, the mail starts arriving. Official-looking notices demanding fees. Cold calls to a phone number you only gave the state. Letters addressed to a company you formed last month, from firms you have never heard of. That is not a coincidence.

This article is sponsored by Erase.com Ask three reputation management firms what they charge and you will usually get three sales calls instead of three numbers. Pricing in this category is unusually opaque, which leaves business owners trying to evaluate a proposal with no real sense of whether it is reasonable. The harder problem, though, is not the missing price tag. It is that most comparisons between handling reputation in-house and hiring a firm are not comparisons at all.