Save money on technology post-COVID

COVID-19 has crippled many businesses and staying afloat means doing everything you can as a business owner to keep your overheads down and your profits up. Technology can often come at quite a substantial upfront investment or even long-term cost, and right now is the time for businesses to reduce these costs to keep their businesses running. Some of our top tips for saving cash post-COVID include:

Make use of VoIP services

Many businesses have already transitioned from fixed-line services to VoIP alternatives, but now more than ever, the benefit of reduced call costs where savings of up to 50% can be attained, are the wisest choice when it comes to telephonic communictions. Worried about the potential charge for setup? Even the setup costs can be affordable when you choose a leasing option rather than an outright purchase of the equipment. Some VoIP services even offer desktop or mobile software based clients that don’t need hardware.

Drop the travel expenses

Expensive accomodation, vehicle rentals and all the entertainment that comes along with business travel is just not worth your doors closing. A better alternative is to take your meetings to the cloud through a video conferencing solution. If you’re worried about the security of certain video meeting tools, a great alternative is Starleaf or using Microsoft Teams to do all your national or international meetings. It saves you time and saves you moola.

Reduced Licensing expenses

In business, we all have them, those monthly amounts that come off the business credit card and end up being quite a large sum, usually from some license based software we barely use. If you have any marketing tools, website addons, mail services or other license-based software that could potentially be downgraded to a FREE version for a while but still maintain the same or similar functionality, do so. This can save you quite a bit.

Remote-working or hot-desking

If you’re renting a premises, chances are you are paying quite a sum to fit your staff compliment in there. Why not reduce your office space, which in turn should reduce your rentals by downgrading to a smaller office space and giving employees the ability to work remotely or provide a hot-desk environment for employees if they are regularly needing to check into the office. By doing this, you also save on your utilities and running costs, such as coffees, teas, cleaning services and more.

Leverage technology flexibility

You can reduce almost 30% of your technology expenditure by leveraging its flexibility. Many office technology solutions can be scaled down with your business, or grow with your business. During this time, its best to take advantage of that by decommissioning applications with little usage, reducing demand and service volumes, or suspending non-essential projects that take up a lot of resource with little income value.

Save costs on your monthly print volumes

If you’re not already on a printer service agreement, consider placing your printers on a service agreement, this will reduce the costs of monthly callouts and will also reduce your monthly spend on ink and other hardware that requires frequent cleaning or changing.