Fortunately, a number of tools and services are now available on the Web to help home business owners run their day smoothly. Best of all, many of these tools are available for free. Many of these services let customers subscribe to a service instead of buying conventional software. From personal information manager (PIM) to automating business processes, the Web offers a number of products that can help lighten the every day load for you.

Here are some of the free tools that your home business can benefit from:

Yahoo Calendar (http://calendar.yahoo.com) offers one of the most powerful online calendar service in the Web today. This is a great place to store information on contacts, calendar items, to-do lists and even "reminders" via e-mail to nag you when items are coming due. In addition, it offers synchronization with many popular PIM/PDA devices and packages, including Microsoft Outlook.

Tired of too much paperwork? You can cut paperwork and automate routine business processes ­ for free. Freeworks.com (http://www.freeworks.com) provides Internet-based management and administrative solutions, from creating and printing professional looking invoices, automating expense reporting, and downloading various business forms.

OutPurchase.com (http://www.outpurchase.com) is procurement management made easy. Purchase all your office products and supplies from one site, from home office furniture and technology supplies, even promotional items. No need to go from one site to another. It even has features that allow you to control spending by fixing a maximum dollar amount on each order.

If you are tired of paying too much for those recurring monthly bills, try out the services of LowerMyBills.com (http://www.lowermybills.com). Simply enter your zip code and find the cheapest rates for long distance, wireless, Internet access, credit cards, mortgage, gas and electric, and much more.

Electronic collaboration used to be the privilege of large companies with intranets. Now, a variety of Web-based offerings can allow you to share information electronically with your customer and clients and provide many of the same functions as large corporate intranets. You only need Internet access to enjoy Web-based collaboration tools. A sites that offer this service is vJungle (http://www.vjungle.com) and do not charge any fees for their core service.

If you are concerned that your computer may break down and you lose all your files, you can store your files with Driveway.com (http://www.driveway.com). Their free service will get you 25MB of free storage space in a password-protected account. Point-and-click access allows for easy storing, transferring, renaming, locking, deleting, copying, sharing, and viewing files online. Once shared files are selected, e-mail notifications are sent automatically to sharing recipients to allow immediate access. Large files can be transferred without e-mail attachments, removable storage devices, or floppy diskettes.