Directory / Use cases / Free tools for small business owners
LLC costs, project margins, and cash flow math for running the shop.
Running a small business means making a dozen money decisions a week with incomplete information. I have watched owners agonize for days over choices a five-minute calculation would have settled: which state to form the LLC in, whether a project is actually profitable, what that unpaid invoice is really costing while it sits. The tools below exist to compress those decisions from days to minutes.
Start with structure. LLC formation fees range from $50 in some states to $500 in Massachusetts, and annual report fees vary just as wildly. The state-by-state comparison lays it all out, because overpaying your home state by $300 a year for a decade is a $3,000 mistake nobody needed to make. If you run client work, the project margin tracker is the one I would install first: agencies routinely discover that their biggest client is their least profitable once hours are honestly counted.
Cash flow is the other killer. A $10,000 invoice paid 60 days late is not a $10,000 problem, it is a $10,000 hole in the month you needed it. The late-payment interest calculator quantifies exactly what slow payers cost you, which makes the awkward conversation much easier to have. And if you are considering factoring an invoice to get cash now, run the factoring calculator first. The effective APR on factoring routinely lands between 20 and 40 percent, which is fine if you know it and dangerous if you do not.
Two quiet money leaks worth checking: meetings and printing. A weekly one-hour meeting with six people averaging $45 an hour costs you over $14,000 a year in salary time. Run the meeting cost calculator on your recurring meetings and cancel the ones that cannot justify themselves. And the printer cost-per-page comparison routinely shows that the $79 printer is the most expensive printer in the store once ink is counted.
Track per-client project margins before they go sideways.
Open the tool →The real dollar cost of that meeting, based on who's in the room.
Open the tool →Generate clean, professional contractor invoices in seconds.
Open the tool →Formation fees are lowest in states like Kentucky and Arkansas at around $40 to $50, versus $500 in Massachusetts. But forming out of state usually means registering as a foreign LLC where you actually operate, which means paying twice. For most owners, their home state is the right answer. Compare the full first-year and annual costs before deciding.
Track every hour against the project, including revisions and admin, then divide the fee by total hours and compare to your target rate. Most agencies find 1 in 5 projects loses money once hours are honest. The project margin calculator does this math per client so you can renegotiate or fire the losers.
Factoring companies typically charge 1 to 5 percent of the invoice value per month until the client pays. On a $10,000 invoice paid in 60 days at 3 percent per month, that is $600, an effective APR near 36 percent. Sometimes worth it for payroll week. Rarely worth it as a habit.