As your business grows, multiple sites or offices are a natural progression as you establish your company as a nationwide organisation. However with such expansion comes leaps and bounds in expenditure, as running your business from multiple locations can be a major drain of resources. How efficient is your business in terms of utilities, telecoms, and the essentials that keep it active on a day-to-day basis? We’ve got some expert tips to help you become more cost-effective and cut down on unnecessary expenditure.
Audit Your Expenditure
Reviewing the outgoings of your business doesn’t necessarily require an expensive audit and report. When you sit down and think about the major costs accrued by your sites, most of them will be relatively easily to calculate.
How much are you spending on your workforce, utilities, stationery and company expenses, and how does this break down? Are you getting the best deal on these essentials both for each individual location, and overall for your business? Start asking the right questions and you’ll soon identify easy areas for improvement.
Consolidate Your Costs
Large companies should benefit from economies of scale, so if you’ve noticed your costs spiralling disproportionately in one area of your business, it’s likely that you could be making huge savings. For example you shouldn’t be on individual gas and electricity plans for each of your offices – large companies can take advantage of bespoke packages that account for all of their locations, to get a better deal in bulk and make it simple to manage your cash flow from month to month.
But where do you start in consolidating your business expenditure? Independent business utility and telecoms experts can do the hard work for you, calculating your usage of gas, electric, broadband and communications to help you find the best packages for your multi-site business. That way you can have one contract for your utilities that you know meets your exact requirements, so you can keep your costs down and stop worrying about exceeding your contract.
Make Staff Accountable
Who is responsible for making sure that company expenses aren’t abused, that you find the best price for office basics, and that bills are paid on time, every time? Having an accountant is a must for any business, but assign someone in a position of responsibility who can ensure that individual office costs are kept under control.
Those small expenses might seem insignificant to an employee, but they soon start adding up for the business as a whole. So make sure someone is accountable for the costs of that site and you’ll notice a difference each month.
Make multi-site business management simple and take advantage of economies of scale, by taking a critical approach to costs and outgoings and thinking outside the box for solutions that can help your business save money. With a little assistance, you can find the right plans and packages for your individual requirements, so you can start turning more revenue into profit.
This article was written by Kelly Gilmour-Grassam with useful information from OptionBox. Kelly is a Yorkshire lass who loves eating our in interesting places. You can follow Kelly on Twitter @KellyGGrassam.
