Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning we get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through our links, at no cost to you. Please read our disclosure for more info.
Last Updated on May 22, 2024 by Work In My Pajamas
Being a business owner isn’t easy. There are many different things you have to do competently to keep a company afloat. One of these is keeping your financial house in order. If you are not able to keep your expenses well below your revenues, you will go out of business. To help, below are three things that can help you manage your company in a frugal way to keep your expenses under control.
1. Business Analytics Software
One way you can certainly improve your company’s finances is by making an investment into cutting edge technology. Business analytics software can certainly help you create a much more aerodynamic company.
If you are able to collect and store all the data regarding your products, customers, marketing campaigns and more, this means you will have the ability to later analyze that information. If you have business analytics software, you can parse this data to find important data points and use it to forecast trends. This may mean being able to make adjustments in the middle of marketing campaign or determine what products sell during what parts of the year. This can reduce wasteful spending and slash overstock that is never sold.
2. Checks
While new technology should certainly be part of your business strategy, keeping some more traditional ways of doing business may be the best idea under certain circumstances. These days, many companies rely on business credit cards. While these can be convenient for quickly making purchases, they can also quickly amass a lot of debt through the extremely high interest rates typically charged for these kinds of accounts.
With this in mind, it may be a better idea to make most purchases for your company with checks. Since the money comes out of a checking account, no interest will be accrued. Checks also support more frugal spending decisions. The money is taken from a limited amount in a checking account. This contrasts against credit which, for all practical purposes, is virtually unlimited. A business owner writing out the dollar amounts him or herself will also give that entrepreneur a more concrete sense of the money that is being spent on a daily basis.
Checks also don’t have to be boring. Designer checks that can include art and designs specific to a certain company can be purchased. This can add a nice personal touch to the business transactions you perform with partners and suppliers.
To stay frugal, you need to slash overhead. In the recent past, one of the biggest overhead expenses for many companies was related to IT. IT departments and full time IT employees certainly don’t come cheap. One way to solve this problem is by outsourcing your IT through the use of cloud computing. With cloud computing, all software is managed remotely by the vendor. Since it is loaded through the cloud, you will not need employees on site to install it or trouble shoot problems. The software’s support staff can do it for you from a completely different location.
Better yet, data stored in the cloud cannot be lost. Even recently, companies have lost millions of dollar’s worth of data stored on local servers that were taken out by electrical storms, floods or other bad weather. This is not a risk with cloud computing, however, because the data is not stored locally. It is shared among different assets in the cloud. The failure of one of those assets will not wipe out the data.
Overall, being able to stay in business for the long term requires a good amount of frugality from managers, business owners and CEOs. If you want to insure that your company remains healthy well into the future, you must be constantly looking for new ways to save money.
