When the business is flourishing, people forget about being frugal but they always remember the “bad old days”. People don’t like scrambling to “do something” in a crunchy situation. If you are doing perfectly fine and your business is stable, why not make an endeavor to cut expenses and make some more money in the pocket?
Marketplace is getting competitive with every passing days and it is imperative to control expenses and curtail unwanted expenditure as much as possible. Operations, labor and massive equipments are not possible to cut because they have deep impacts on the overall productivity of the business. The easy target would be to curtail the office expenses where the latest technology and creative thinking can minimize expenditure. If you make some changes in the way your business operates, a lot of money can be saved every year.
4 Steps to Reduce Office Expenses and Increase Cash Inflow
- Power: There is a lot of light and other power strips running 24 hours in the office. Turn them off and it will reduce the unwanted power expenditure. A little amount of change the way workers are careless about power can cut a lot of office expenses. You should encourage all your staff and other employees to turn off power when not in use. If possible try to install motion sensitive lights in your office. At the same time the power strips that run most of the office appliances should be turned down at the end of the day.
- Telephone: You can minimize the telephone expenses by encouraging staff to use their own cell phone for making personal calls. However the company can reimburse the amount so incurred at the end of the month. At the same time you need to re-examine the phone plan of the employees. Employers sometimes don’t have any idea how much they are paying for the phone plans. Have a check on it and don’t pay for those features that employees don’t use. Search for cheaper plans because it will consume less expenditure.
- Travel: Try to avoid any kind of traveling until and unless it is really important for your company. If you are running a small business and have to make frequent travels, then it can be a costly affair and you need to put a check on it. It would be better if your client pays for the travel expenses and other lodging costs so incurred. Most clients would agree and if they don’t, ask them to reimburse at least 50 percent of the total expenses. It would be a great idea to use technology instead of traveling. Cisco and other companies offer many visualization products like for instance Webex and Skype that can be used for conferences and remote meetings.
- Printing: Sometimes printer consumes a lot of expenditure and it is one of the important areas where a lot of office expenses are involved. Make sure everyone in the company is aware with the printer settings and how to minimize font size so that more text can fit in the paper, how to print on both sides of page etc. Also make sure employees are aware of Print Preview command so that there are no errors in the hard copy. Instead of using inkjet printer, go for Laser-jet one. It is cost effective which prints at 1-2 cents per page. Now, if you take that average prince for ink cartridges is $30 and multiply that with number of your printers you can see how much are you spending.
There are lots of offers and other deals available on cartridge and ink refill on the web. At the same time electronic copies should be used instead of printing for the inter-office use.
