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. I was evaluating a system to run my business and I was really disappointed to find NetSuite pricing was going to leave me with no money to spend on the essential tools I need to get the job done. I have learned that I can do most of my key business tasks using free software. You will not learn this trick on any business course. Every small business owner I have talked to in the last three weeks didn’t know about the mass of free software available on the internet.
Follow these three simple steps to start cutting costs now.
- Ten minutes every day searching for a specific type of tool.
- Record everything you find on the web using Evernote (free).
- Just ten minutes at the end of each day exploring the features of your findings.
It should take you about a month to find all of the tools you will ever need and be up and running on free software. To help you get started and prove my point here is a list of tools I use regularly.
Chances are you have heard or are using the software tools I have listed on the right, I have done this to help you easily identify the tools you may want to evaluate as replacements which are listed on the left.
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
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 NetSuite pricing incident for the inspiration to write this up and help you out.
I will be publishing a long list here in the near future…
