How to save money in your business
Cutting your software costs
I want to help you save money and I am never going to ask you for anything in return.
Every year I save thousands of pounds by not spending any money on software. I was evaluating a system to run my business and I was really disappointed to find NetSuite pricing was going to leave me with no money to spend on the essential tools I need to get the job done. I have learned that I can easily complete most of my key business tasks using software that I paid nothing for. You wont find this taught at business school. I am greatly saddened by the number of people in small businesses who are not aware of this approach.
You need to do three things to make this strategy work for you.
- 10 minutes/day search on one term ie free wordprocessor.
- Record your findings using the free service from evernote.com.
- Just spend about ten minutes every day trying out your findings.
It took me about for weeks on and off spending max twenty minutes a day to discover all of the tools I am ever going to need. To get you going here is a small sample of the tools I use every day to get the job done.
The software listed on the left is free and in some cases there is an upgrade to a paid version but don’t let this daunt you I get by with the free version most of the time (to help you easily identify what each tool does I have listed their “paid” for equivalents on the left hand side – I hope this helps).
Here we go:
Just type the name of the free product to the search engines
One system to manage customers and accounting
salesorder.com pricing: free NetSuite pricing – really expensive
Sorry I couldnt resist this one…
Creating and writing Documents
Google Docs pricing: $0 Microsoft Office pricing – at least $100
Or
OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org)
Sharing ideas online
Bubbl.us pricing: $0 Mindjet pricing – at least $200
Making videos
Jing pricing: $0 Camtasia Studio pricing – at least $300
Teleseminars
DimDim pricing: $0 AdobeConnect pricing – at least $200/month
My thanks to the NetSuite pricing incident for the inspiration to write this up and help you out.
More soon…
0 comments Tuesday 30 Jun 2009 | | Business