Cutting your IT budget
I want to help you save Cash and I am not going to ask you for a dime in return.
Every year I save thousands of pounds by not spending any money on software. You may not have heard of them but it was Sage Software (an accounting system) that drove me to start looking for better deals on the web. I have learned that I can easily complete most of my key business tasks using software that I paid nothing for. You will not learn this trick on any business course. I am greatly saddened by the number of people in small businesses who are not aware of this approach.
Perform these three simple tasks to start saving money.
* Each working day spend 10 mins searching for a specific tool.
* Go get yourself a free copy of Evernote (it's free, just serach Google).
* Spend 10 mins. everyday giving your findings a very quick try.
Spend just one month on this task and at the end you will have the free software you need and loads of ideas on how you can make your business more cost efficient. To get you off to the right start, here is a selection of the software I use everyday.
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 Sage Software - really expensive and only does Accounting
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 Sage Software incident for the desire to write this up and help you out.
More soon...
