If you’ve come here wondering how to do small business taxes for your LLC, you’ve come to the right place. One of the most daunting aspects of starting a business in the first place, can be thinking about your tax compliance. How to do it for a low cost, but also do it right. Will you need to pay sales tax? Pay quarterly taxes? These are the questions new business owners ask themselves when they are starting up. Sometimes, not having the answers will stop them from forming a business altogether.

Quite simply, as a small business, you can’t afford the fees of an accounting firm who would definitely do things right for you. Is it possible to file small business taxes on your own? We all know there is a HOST of products out there designed to help you, but how do you know if you’re getting a good value of what you pay for?


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That’s where I come in, right now, to assist with recommendations. As a Certified Public Accountant and professional tax preparer of many years, there is one product I will always recommend to small business owners when it comes time to file their small business taxes as a single-member LLC. I’ve been using it for my own taxes,  as well as with tax clients of mine for several years now, with no plans to switch anytime soon.
The problem with one of the main do-it-yourself tax softwares (cough TurboTax cough), is that once you go beyond a simple personal return they start charging you by the form. So that by the time you’ve produced your Schedule C (the main form for filing your business that I’ll discuss later on in this article) and added in a few other “extras” like your student loan payments or dividends you’ve received, the cost to prepare your return has suddenly sky-rocketed.

100% Free Federal. $14.99 State. Direct IRS E-File. FreeTaxUSA.com


These “hidden fees” are absolutely not a problem with my preferred tax software, FreeTaxUSA. The way FreeTaxUSA works is that instead of charging per form, they simply charge per state you need to file. Are you living and working with your LLC in New York? Then you’ll file your entire federal business return for free and your New York State return for just $14.99. Are you living and working with your LLC in a no-income-tax State such as Florida or a Washington? Your LLC return will cost you exactly $0. And so on.

And unlike these other sites who “get you hooked” with the promise of a low or no cost return, there is simply NO inflation of the FreeTaxUSA price. Got just a W-2? Great, file to the IRS for $0 and your state for $14.99. Do you own two LLCs, receive dividend income, run a rental property, all while making freelance 1099 income? Filing with the IRS will be $0, filing with your state will be $14.99. They even make it easy to import from some of the tax softwares that you may have been less than satisfied by when you filed last year.

It’s not like those other tax software programs who tack on “extra” fees for everything under the sun.


FreeTaxUSA avoids ALL of that with their flat fee structure. In fact, the only way you’re going to end up paying more than $14.99 is the situation where you choose Deluxe Edition for $6.99, as way to gain priority support and ability to easily chat with the team from FreeTaxUSA.

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Now I'm an accountant and a long-time tax preparer and I know what I'm doing. For anyone feeling confident about giving their own small business taxes a try but a little hesitant, I would easily recommend paying the extra $6.99 for the audit support and priority customer service support that comes with it.

The important thing to remember is, if you own a business, you shouldn’t need to pay an arm and a leg to do taxes yourself. In fact, I really want you to be able to do your small business taxes yourself and save that money for things you care about more than taxes, so I’m going to walk you through doing your Schedule C within the FreeTaxUSA website in a short video below, so you can see just how easy it can be to accurately do taxes for your business on your own on the cheap.

TAX NERD TIME!


An LLC, also known as a “disregarded entity”, can either be single member or multi-member. The hypothetical LLC being discussed in this article is a single-member LLC. How to do taxes for a multi-member LLC is a different process entirely and an article that I have coming soon! Unfortunately for those of you with multi-member LLC’s the below will not apply.

FreeTaxUSA is still a great software to file your personal taxes with though, even though your business taxes will be getting filed separately. They even have a PDF import that you can use for your previous year's taxes, if you've decided you were less than satisfied and are looking for an affordable new option.

If you are the only member of your LLC and you're ready to file your business taxes, this video is for you!



FreeTaxUSA Deluxe Edition. Try for Free. Pay when you file.

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Hopefully this video shows you the in's and out's of preparing a Schedule C along with your personal return. Hopefully the preparation aspect is not as complicated as you thought, or confirmed for you that you're on the right track.

If you’re still unsure about whether filing your own small business taxes makes sense for you, stay tuned for more of my reviews, including my review of what bookkeeping softwares can make your life so simple at tax time.

Lastly, if you think I can help you with anything related to your business taxes, please comment below and I'll be happy to discuss with you.