Every year American companies lose millions of dollars in productivity to employees who end up taking personal time off to do their taxes. Whether you are filing by paper from just one W-2 or running multiple enterprises, streamlining now will payoff this year and in future.

Applying these proven Tax Time Tune-Up tips will save you time, frustration and could even save you money. Even if you only reduce your stress level – it’s worth it! Start today by getting an archive box or file crate to hold all your 2004 tax related files and forms.

If you have a good filing system, but you keep getting bogged down in old records: Every January, pull last year’s financial files, any business related expenses, proof of income and all tax related items. While you are taking 2004 files out, make replacement 2005 file folders for all of your regular home and business or personal financial and legal documents.

If you have no functioning filing system for your home (or business) I recommend you sort out your papers for 2004 tax and archives after setting up FileSolutions TM color-coded pre-printed file kit for 2005 that fits your current filing needs . (http://www.organize.com) That way you’ll have right place to put each item as you handle it. I use Home and Small Business FileSolutions TM kits in my own business, which makes it easy for me to guarantee satisfaction.

Tax Preparation Software: By using tax preparation software, you can finish your federal and state returns in about 90 minutes—if you’ve completed steps above. The software helps you find deductions, does math for you and tells you what you owe or what your refund will be. Use tax preparation software matched to your situation and financial software; there are several available (TaxCut, TurboTax, etc.).

I use TurboTax (by makers of Quicken) to do my own taxes. If I can do it – so can you! Then, I have a tax professional check my return for way less money than it would have cost me to have my business and personal taxes done by a tax professional.

Good News/Bad News: If your Adjusted Gross Income for 2004 is less than $28,000, or you qualify for Earned Income Tax Credit – go to http://www.taxfreedom.com and use Intuit’s TurboTax program online for FREE!

Online tax-preparation sites keep improving their do-it-yourself tax tools, ease of preparation and regular or e-filing expertise. These offer same process as desktop software does but, it is all done online. After products sift through your return for errors (and suggest tax-saving strategies), you can print your completed return or file it electronically.

To give you an idea of what is involved I will outline 7 steps you need to take to set up your own money making website. This will give you basics of what is involved and allow you to do further research and make progress in each of these seven areas.

Step 1 – Your business idea

If you already have a business or a business idea, you can skip this step. If not, then spend some time writing a list of all things that interest you. The chances of succeeding in your new business are far greater if you are doing something that you are passionate about. This way it won’t feel like you are doing a job when you start spending time on this. Don’t worry too much about a product at this point, just think about things you like to do – perhaps you like cooking, or playing football, or foreign travel. Try to write down at least 5 things that you enjoy.

Step 2 – Research your Market and Analyse Competition

Once you have completed step 1, you need to find out if there is a market in areas that you are interested in. At same time you may want to avoid entering a market that is highly competitive. From my experience best way to analyse this is by using a tool called Wordtracker. Note that trial version is a cut down version of much more powerful full version and only includes statistics from one search engine rather than multiple engines.

Use this software as a brainstorming tool and type in your interests that you came up with in step 1 (or your original business idea). Wordtracker will return related keywords, which you can then select and add to your “basket”. At this stage it is best to keep an open mind and fill your basket with around 1000 keyword phrases. Finally you can do a “competitive analysis” on keywords that you have chosen. This will allow you to see how many searches a day are done on a per search engine basis for each keyword phrase.

In addition to this you will also see number of competing websites and a value called a “KEI” which is a “Keyword Effectiveness Index”. You have a better chance of succeeding if you choose keywords that have a KEI above 100. If KEI is above 400, then you have an excellent chance of success.

Ensure that you spend sufficient time in this planning phase, repeating above process again and again until you have a good set of related keywords with good KEIs. Once you have chosen your keywords you should check out your competition by typing keywords into Google and looking at top websites for each keyword phrase that you have selected. The Google and Alexa toolbars can help you with your analysis of competing websites

Step 3 – Choose a Product

If you don’t already have a product in mind, next step is to decide on your product or group of products. Before you do this, try to do some research and find out exactly what your potential customers are looking for. What sort of questions are they asking? Google Groups are an excellent place for doing this sort of research.

One solution is to join some affiliate programs (related to your chosen keywords of course). Affiliate programs are usually free to join and pay you a commission for directing customers from your site via a special affiliate link. You can find a lot of information about affiliate programs by searching for “Affiliate Programs” on Google.