annual self-employment taxes before the year is up?

I've been self-employed for about a year now, and unfortunately it only recently dawned on me that I may have to pay self-employment taxes every quarter, as opposed to paying them at the end of the year. In case you've never had to deal with this, the government states that you're supposed to be collecting your own taxes throughout the year as your employer would do if you weren't self-employed. Every quarter you're supposed to send in a check for your "expected" income tax. However, there are a few problems with this concept.

For one, your business is so new and the income is most sporadic and you have no financial history to estimate what kind of profits you're going to see. For another thing, starting a business sometimes requires heavy start-up costs so you can't really afford to screw up and underpay your quarterly taxes and get charged a late payment fee. To determine if you have to pay quarterly or settle up at the end of the year, you need to fill out your regular income tax forms now. Yes, we're talking the 1040, schedule C, etc. etc. - all before you've even started making money, since you need to have it set up prior to first quarter. Talk about impossible. Plus, the last thing I feel like doing is filing out all of my income tax forms with imaginary estimated figures.

Accounting has got to be the worst part of being self-employed, especially for those of us doing internet businesses that deal in things like affiliate marketing. You've got a million different things to track, using several different types of paperwork or software, and few if any of them can communicate with one another. You've got Paypal for your incoming online payments, you've got adwords for your advertising costs, google analytics for tracking traffic, commission junction for your sales commissions, random paper expenses and bills, microsoft excel (or open office calc) for sales tracking, microsoft money or quicken for your banking...geez. Wouldn't it be nice to have some sort of financial consolidation software that takes all of this into account and figures out the relationship between all of these items for you, and then spits out the appropriate populated tax forms at the end of the year? Talk about some dream software. I'm not sure such a product exists. If it did, it would have to incorporate the changes and software updates of all of these products (plus the annual changes to tax forms each year) rolled into one, which is asking a lot.

At this point, I guess it is more profitable to force business owners to use professional accounting services and keep them guessing by occasionally making changes to the tax laws. Or maybe it's part of the government's plan for keeping the economy strong, since that is all they seem to really care about. After all, you need to think of all of the jobs that would go away if filing taxes was actually easy. But then again, think of all the businesses that might be able to better optimize their finances (and possibly stay in business longer) if they could get past the initial hurdle of their taxes.