Credit crunch blues? Thinking about leaning your processes? Now might be the right time to do so.

Companies are now thinking more and more about how to best save money, and that is really not a surprise. The currency fluctuation, major banks scared to lend money to businesses, saving rates next to nothing. Many companies are doing their best to keep afloat, office space re-planning, human resources being disposed of, consolidation of departments, company mergers. I am sure you have already heard about some of these drastic changes.

It gets worse if you are a small company, right down to every bit of expenditure, printing, telephone bills, travelling. It all counts!

So what can you do? Although we can’t tell you everything you could do we can mention three things that can help you:

1: shop rental, commercial space: do you still need it? Have you thought that you can achieve the same on the net? It costs less to create and maintain an e-commerce than it does to maintain a high street shop and you can potentially reach out to new customers further away than you would on the high street. You can redirect your expenditure by hiring warehouse space for your goods...

2: printing: do you really need to print everything? Why don’t you get your customers to print it instead? Yes, electronic invoices are just as good as printed ones. The best thing is that you can store millions of invoices in just a few cubic inches if you do so electronically. You can do the same with letters, memos, etc. In fact most companies like to have electronic records anyway for auditing reasons. Companies use email for nearly everything they do. It is predicted that by 2020 every telephone line in the UK will have broadband, which means every household, shop, warehouse, and office. In effect, anyone with a land phone will have access to the internet.

3: travelling:  unless you really like commuting to your office and back it is really time that is lost to you, but more importantly it is expensive lost time by either petrol, train or whatever your method of transport is. Only a very small percentage of the population in the UK actually work within walking distance from their work. So, have you thought about running your business from your own home? You will not believe how many big companies started in someone’s lounge, or garage, or bedroom.  But how much would it cost to create office space from your house? It really depends on how much you want to achieve from within it but I guarantee you that it will be much less than having dedicated office space on a high street.

There are other things you could do with smart marketing and lean business processes but it will be best to talk about those as a separate article.  We leave you with the first three recommendations for you to think if they are suitable to your line of business.

We hope this advice is useful to you, but if you need more detailed information about each recommendation then it is best to contact us for advice on 0845 0573021. Advice is completely free of charge.

Remember, you can have IT systems that suit your needs without massive up-front expenditure. All you have to do is know what you can get for your money. Ask, you might be surprised what you can achieve.