Cutting your software budget

I want to help you save Cash and I am not going to ask you for a penny in return.

Every year I save thousands of euros by not spending any money on software. This whole exercise began when I was looking at Sage Software as I needed one system to manage the key functions in my business. It is now possible to perform most of the key business tasks using the software that costs nothing. Only the Lord knows why this stuff isn’t evryday knowledge for most business folks. In fact I would be suprised if many experienced business owners know what I am about to share with you.

I just follow these three steps to get the free tools.

* Take 10 mins everyday and carefully search for each category of tool you need.
* Go get yourself a free copy of Evernote (it’s free, just serach Google).
* Just spend about ten minutes every day trying out your findings.

You should expect it to take about a month to get a list that will give you everything you need for today and the future. To help you get a head start here are some of the tools I have found and use on a regular basis.

To make this even easier for you I have listed each tool (on the right) with an equivalent (on the left) you will definitely have to part money for and may well have heard for or even purchased.

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 Sage Software – really expensive and only does Accounting

Creating and writing Documents

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

Or

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 Sage Software incident for the inspiration!motivation to write this up and help you out.

Come back soon as I will be adding more insights here…

Accounting is for accountants and what’s frustrating is they want it to stay this way, so it’s not really suprising that people similar to me who own a small business and cannot and don’t want to afford an accountant uncovered the shortcut I want to give to you here. People in small enterprises tend to prefer doing more significant tasks such as getting, understanding and keeping customers as opposed to doing their bookkeeping. All companies have to pay special attention to their bookkeeping if they want to avoid problems.

When I initially started out my bookkeeper suggested or should I say insisted that I used a small business accounting software package made by a company called Sage Software. Without even looking at software I simply went ahead and bought the lowest cost version I could find. On reflection I am lucky I didn’t burn too much cash on this as this package is possibly the most badly designed and most complex system I have ever had to deal with. To be straight with you whenever I find the word accounting next to the word software I am instantly reminded of the first piece of advice I must share with you and that is most small business accounting software makes the assumption you have a good working knowledge of bookkeeping.

Like me I know this just isn’t the case for most small business people and this drove me to put aside time that I couldn’t spare to search for a solution to make my life simpler. The great news is I found a really good answer, it’s an online system called salesorder.com.

Arguably the best application I have discovered, salesorder.com works on the web and is really well designed and of course lets me do my job anywhere I can connect to the web. Better still and the third piece of guidance I want to share with you is that the team who work at salesorder.com are not just very knowledgeable of their application but they know a tremendous amount about the problems of running a small enterprise and have taught me the accounting I need to know.

Running a company efficiently is about organisation, focus and process as a massive 55% of businesses don’t make it to their fifth birthday. The observers offer shallow explanations as to why this occurs. I consistently see three key reasons why this tragedy occurs so often and to so many people with different experience, education and knowledge.

The primary reason is insufficient market comprehension.

Refusal to look at the water ahead. For example Individuals have the concept, create the product and then expect the market to flock and buy. In networked age there is no excuse for lack of investigation prior to spending any time and money on building a product until you have firm evidence there is a market.

The number two reason is lack of comprehension of the basics of business.

The majority of folks starting a business know their trade, how to offer a service or build a product, but not how to run a business.  Having the ability to understand and follow the balances in the Income statement or the balance sheet is a vital. The basic knowledge of accounting is not very often imparted coherently by the business books, online resources and experts in the know such as CPAs and bookkeepers. This subject is further complicated by manufacturers and their alliances peddling small business accounting software at fledgling businesses.

Sage software and other vendors as usual are underserving small businesses.

Large corporations way back figured out that all of their Information systems should be wired together to give them a total view of the business and then along came ERP software solutions and packages. One technology business NetSuite had the foresight to see the gap in the market and started offering its small business ERP software. NetSuite pricing has since increased and put their solution out of the financial reach of small businesses.

The final reason businesses don’t survive is a because of the lack of practical management processes and policies to enable a sustainable fabric of disciplines and behaviours.