At the best of times the budgeting process can be time consuming and painful. With the current economic woes, the budgeting process can get downright unbearable often needing to make decisions that you not otherwise make, but have no choice.
Below are some easy areas to consider reviewing when doing your budgets. Hopefully you can find some areas for cost savings.
- Review Your Telephone Bills – if you can make it through all of the confusing content, run the numbers to ensure you are paying for what you need and are getting the best possible pricing.
- Cell Phone Plan – If you are not on a company wide shared minute plan, find out what is keeping you from doing this and get it implemented so you can save some money there. Also review the details to ensure all of the handsets have the proper options and minutes needed. You may find out that you have several users that do texting and even a handful of texts per month will cost more than getting a texting plan. Texting is here to stay for a while so embrace it.
- Software maintenance – Do you really need the annual maintenance on a specific software or are you missing a plan for one that you actually need? For example, often, companies will get the annual maintenance on a new accounting program. This makes sense since it is new and you will need support. For year two it probably makes sense to renew the maintenance since it is still a relatively new program. Year three it might not make sense to renew the annual maintenance since internal users can handle most minor support needs and doing the math could yield a saving but doing one off support calls if ever needed. What about new software revisions that come out? Upgrading an accounting system is not a simple thing and usually after only two years of having the program and quite a bit less that that being in production, you do not want to do an upgrade for a while.
- Hardware maintenance – You definitely need this, but at what point does it make sense to stop it? As hardware ages, the manufacturer does not maintain parts and does not want to support it any longer. We have seen times when the annual maintenance was about the cost of a new server so where would you spend the money? For some networking hardware, it may be more cost effective to buy an extra device to sit on a shelf pre-configured and ready to go if ever needed rather than maintaining annual maintenance on all of the like equipment.
- Technology Management – No one likes the up and down billing of utilizing technology support from a 3rd party firm. There are many advantages to utilizing a fully managed technology support plan, but for the budgeting and cash flow process, it makes this very easy since it is a fixed monthly fee. No ups and downs to worry about unless you are contemplating a new initiative. With the Waident Managed plan, you get a cost effective fixed monthly fee and receive unlimited support and management which happens to make your billing and budgeting process easy.
If you do not look you may never find these and many other cost saving areas. As for the budgeting process, it will still be painful, but not nearly as much since you now have something concrete to work off of for next year. Since you did the heavy lifting and know what to look for, it often turns in to a much simpler process.
If you need any help, give me a call or email and let me know your troubles.
