Saving Money in Technology Costs in Business

One of the larger costs of setting up a business is technology, by technology I mean computers, software, telephones, faxes and printers etc.

Computers and software can run to thousands and thousands of dollars and you can sometimes STILL not be sure that you are not getting ripped off.

In keeping our capital expenditure down and saving money we follow a few simple rules:

Software

We do not use Microsoft Office, instead we use Open Office which is a free MS Office equivalent from Sun microsystems.

It will still open and manage all the normal office files like Excel, Word and PowerPoint and it;s free.

Download Open Office Now!

Where we do need support for software or there is simply no equivalent we use the real thing, things like Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop etc there is simply no equivalent in our business and it's simply a tool of the trade.

Hardware

As a general rule we buy Desk top PCs (minus screens) on ebay for about 20% of the price of RRP. We do however store all our networked data on a series of external USB hard drives rather than on local hard drives on the machine.

We do however buy good quality computer monitors for our staff.

So a full desktop computer with high quality screen sets us back about $400 in total, and if one of the PCs does fail we can replace it within 24 hours with another PC and all of the data is on the network rather than the pc itself.

With notebook computers though we buy new and we buy the best available within the budget because notebook computers are subject to far much more breakages than desktop PCs.

The trick with a computer is not so much the speed but the memory. These days anything less than 2gb of RAM is insufficient to run most business applications.

Faxing

Although we do have a fax machine in the office we actually tend to use virtual faxes and virtual fax numbers.

So when a customer sends us a fax it is emailed as a PDF document. This means we reduce the cost of having a dedicated fax line and even if we are not in the office we can still get faxes.

We also send faxes electronically too just like sending an email.

We use http://www.ozefax.com as our virtual telco provider and we have found them excellent to deal with!

So there we have a few simple tips on saving money with technology!