How to spend nothing on technology for your business

Cutting your software costs

I want to help you save money and I am never going to ask you for anything in return.

Every year I save thousands of pounds by not spending any money on software. It was the quote containing the NetSuite pricing that caused a friend to call me up and ask if I could help me get a better deal on software for his business – hence this article. I have learned that I can do most of my key business tasks using free software. Only the Lord knows why this stuff isn’t evryday knowledge for most business folks. The majority of small business people I come into contact dont know anything about this subject and thats a tragedy.

Follow this approach to copy me and start saving money.

Use 10 mins every working day to use Google to find the tools you need.
Use Evernote (free at www.evernote.com) to record your findings.
Devote ten minutes each day to test drive everything you found.

It took me about for weeks on and off spending max twenty minutes a day to discover all of the tools I am ever going to need. OK, as promised here is a shortcut – my favorite tools are listed below, these are the ones I use everyday.

The software listed on the left is free and in some cases there is an upgrade to a paid version but don’t let this daunt you I get by with the free version most of the time (to help you easily identify what each tool does I have listed their “paid” for equivalents on the left hand side – I hope this helps).

Here we go:

Just type the name of the free product to the search engines

One system to manage customers and accounting

salesorder.com pricing: free NetSuite pricing – really expensive

Sorry I couldnt resist this one…

Creating and writing Documents

Google Docs pricing: $0 Microsoft Office pricing – at least $100

OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org)

Sharing ideas online

Bubbl.us pricing: $0 Mindjet pricing – at least $200

Making videos

Jing pricing: $0 Camtasia Studio pricing – at least $300

Teleseminars

DimDim pricing: $0 AdobeConnect pricing – at least $200/month

My thanks to the NetSuite pricing incident for the inspiration to write this up and help you out.

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How to spend nothing on technology for your business

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