In today’s economy, almost every business is looking for areas where they can cut costs. What many don’t realize is by using technology and tools that are so readily available, you can cut some very common and significant costs. Here are a few common expenses that can be cut by using some basic technology that you probably already know about.

Business LAN Line

A business LAN line can run you upwards of $50, depending on all the added features you have associated with. If you have a small office environment and your business doesn’t perform any type of outbound telemarketing services, then you may be able to go without a LAN line. This is especially true if you have cell phones. Why pay the costs of both a cell phone and a LAN line? An alternative would be to sign up for an online 800 phone service such as RingCentral. Online 800-number services can cost under $20 per month and give you some pretty neat options. For example, RingCentral allows you to setup an 800 number with multiple extensions. You can then setup each extension to forward to another phone number (ie. your cell phones). Each extension can even have its own custom greeting and voicemail message. This makes it easy to provide multiple people in your office with their own extension they can give out to clients.

Printing and Mailing Invoices

This is one of my huge pet peeves. I can’t tell you how often I still get invoices through snail mail from companies I do business with. Why not just produce a PDF version of the invoice and email it? Or just email me a Word.doc copy of the invoice. Even that would be better than a printed copy coming through the mail. I recently received an invoice from a company that had a $1.50 balance due. Come on! Do the math. 42 cents for a stamp, plus the cost to print and buy the envelope, plus time involved in preparing and mailing it… the company just lost half of that $1.50. It would have been much easier to just email me the invoice.

Files

Are you still filing your documents and storing them in file cabinets? Eeek! A better way would be to scan your documents and save them to PDF. Then store those PDF’s in an organized folder structure on your computer. Or better yet, build a database to store your information in. Just make sure to have a backup system in place.

Image credit: Caitlinator