Shopping for business assistance in Iowa is a smoother process now than it was a month ago.

A new business-assistance portal added to the state of Iowa’s Web site in late March provides businesses looking to expand existing operations or open a new location in the state with helpful contacts and regulatory assistance information, which they can use to learn more about doing business in Iowa.

Sherry Timmons, a regulatory-assistance coordinator for the Iowa Department of Economic Development, led the development of the business-assistance portal with help from other state agencies and assistance coordinators. The new Web site, www.iowa.gov/state/main/business_portal/index.html, brings together business-assistance and compliance information that had been scattered among many locations.

“There is a heck of a lot of assistance and resources available through the state, but it’s a matter of accessing them,” Timmons said. “You might not know where to start, and it can be frustrating. We went into this project with the idea that when a business comes knocking on our state’s door, there had to be a clear way to coordinate things.”

The IDED researched other states’ efforts to provide regulatory assistance and found that many of the most successful ones used their state Web sites to link people with answers to the most commonly requested categories of information on business assistance and compliance.

The new business-assistance portal includes information on such subjects as licensing, finding regulatory assistance, business taxes, business partners and several other topics related to doing business in Iowa. Timmons said the IDED is deciding now how it will market the site.

“We were trying to take those categories of information that are housed in different agencies’ Web sites to gather the most pertinent and put them in one place for people to find,” Timmons said. “I think it sends a message that we are a business-friendly and business-assistance-friendly state. If you already have that upfront and people are offering to help you identify what you need to know, maybe they will take a serious look here.”