5 tips to reduce costs using IT

At times like the current one, when consumption has been reduced and sales are not at their best, we need to minimize unnecessary expenses. But you can save in many ways. It is important to know what expenses can be minimized without putting our business at risk. For example, reducing the quality of our service or the raw materials we use can lead to a reduction in revenue. However, technology helps us to be efficient in a sustainable way and also prepares us to strengthen our business and emerge stronger from the crisis. Here you can know about rationalizing IT costs.

Remove investments

Many times we do not undertake technological changes, even if their savings are proven, because they require investments that may take time to recover (depending on the amount invested and what it takes to recover with the monthly savings). Investing in times of crisis sounds scary, doesn't it?

Save on licenses

There is free software or at a much lower price than the most popular market applications to perform many tasks: LibreOffice and GoogleDocs (in its non-business version), instead of the classic Microsoft Office. And if we want it to be from Microsoft, Office365 allows us to "rent" licenses in "pay-as-you-go from the cloud" mode. Linux instead of Windows, Picasa to manage our photos, Terabox to have a 100GB hard drive, etc.

Optimize processes

There are numerous applications to organize documents, orders, invoices ... Paper and chaos make us waste time and efficiency, lead us to provide a worse service to our customers and can make us lose them. Acquiring customers is a very expensive process, let's keep them in an orderly way by saving our information with appropriate management software, such as FacturClick for billing, SalesForce for customer CRM, ContaPlus for accounting, etc.

Avoid displacements

Physical meetings and training sessions that involve displacement generate multiple expenses in travel, diets, accommodation and wasted time (who has not had to lose three hours round trip and three back for a two-hour meeting in another location). Using video conferencing software allows us to save on travel and time of our employees and our customers. We gain efficiency, we can hold meetings more frequently, while improving our service and gaining quality of life.

Minimize consumption

As the mothers say, the lights must be turned off when leaving the rooms. But they not only consume the office lights, but also the computers: leaving them on all night can result in an additional energy cost of 60 euros per computer per year, in addition to a greater deterioration of the equipment (up to 70% more that if they turn off), which implies renewing them ahead of time or calling technical service.

Studying if it is worth the change is easy. In a “pay-per-use” mode without investments, the cost per month of the software in question must be analyzed and the cost we have in the item that we intend to reduce must be calculated. Many times we will verify that the savings per month, if we have that application, is greater than the monthly cost, so with that savings, we will already be paying the monthly cost of the application and stop spending another good part. If that is the case, we will be facilitating the work and saving money.