Reducing Business Costs With Technology

A successful business is always working towards three basic goals; increase revenue, decrease costs, and maximise profit. At times, lowering costs will provide the most immediate impact to your bottom line, especially for a small business. By examining various aspects of how your business functions, you can expect to see notable improvements in a relatively short time. Here are some type designed to help you examine your expenses, and actions you can take today to help lower them.

Make Technology Work for You
One of the quickest ways to lower internal business costs is to make sure you are using technology to its full capacity. This can include keeping electronic records in place of paper records, cutting down on business-wide paper and printer ink usage. If customer invoicing is currently done by printing the document, see if your customers would be open to electronic invoicing. This saves not only paper and ink costs, but also any associated postage.

 
Adjust your current telecommunications solutions to lower costs. This may include the cancelation of unnecessary landlines, switching to VoIP or cell phones for voice communication and taking advantage of low cost desktop faxing options. You can also examine alternative conference call services to see if one may work just as well at a lower cost.

Human Resources
The costs of locating, training and supporting a new employee can be high. Technology has brought a multitude of new options that can not only help reduce costs, but help find qualified candidates that may have been previously out of reach. The newest development, cloudsourcing, gives small business access to skilled employees at a fraction of the cost. Not only that, you can hire professionals for specific tasks without having to fully bring them on.

Another way to reduce labor costs is to consider sponsoring an internship. Contact a local college or university and see if they have a program that may help match potential interns to your needs. Not only will you get the assistance you need at a lower cost, you will also be helping a young person learn valuable on the-job skills that they can bring with them into the workplace.

Processing Payroll
Even if your company only has a few employees, the burden of processing payroll can be quite significant. If you are managing these tasks yourself, it is taking away from time you could be spending on other aspects of your business. For small businesses, it often doesn’t make financial sense to hire someone specifically to process payroll. In circumstances such as these, outsourcing your payroll needs may be the answer as the cost is from as little as $35 a week.

Payroll processing services, such as those offered by E-Payoffice, provide the expertise you need to get the task handled, allowing you to move on to more important things. Not only can they make certain your employees are getting paid correctly and on time, they are also SuperStream compliant, ensuring that all super contributions are correctly calculated and paid in line with the ATO’s guidelines.

 
Continue Examining Your Business Practices
These are just a few of the ways you can cut back on business expenses by reducing waste, instituting clever hiring, and outsourcing your payroll burden. You don’t have to stop here. Look at how you spend your time and money and see if a new business practice may be in order.