Today we're going to be talking about money and what can we do to hopefully keep a bit of it in your pocket. We're going to go through some money saving tips for small business that can be applied across the board. Some of them are things more about investing in your capital and utilising that for long term advantage, and some of these are straight up bangers that are just going to save you some money right away.

Throw Out Old Technology

Let's start old, we're going to through and discuss fax machines. Get rid of them. They're dead. Get them out of your business. If you need have a fax machine, get a virtual fax machine for $10 and port the number across. You shouldn't be paying any more than $10 a month for a fax machine. At the same time, get rid of your VHS player. I don't know why you need either of those two things. It's getting to the stage now that even DVD player's becoming a joke. Get rid of those things in your business. Lean it down. They're things you don't need.

Saving Time = Saving Money

A lot of the time saving money comes down to saving time, which can be done through automation. There's tools out there such as Zapya that'll save you lots of time by having things that you'd normally have double data entry automatically disappear. Maybe use Google Sheets or maybe use Excel or whatever you're using to enter data, and then you need to take that data and pop that into your content relation management system be it Salesforce or ActiveCampaign or something else maybe industry specific. Integrating those so that you don't have this extra data double entry will save you stacks of coin. Obviously, that has a bit more of a longterm advantage, and it might only save you a little bit right now, but when it saves you time, that's saving you money.

Outsource

Outsource the bits you don't need. Maybe you don't need to be going through all of your junk in your inbox, and you don't want to be having all this extra spam. Use services such as cloud spam filtration services that get rid of the junk before it even gets to your inbox. Simple things like this only cost a few dollars per inbox per month but can save you hours and hours and hours of frustration of going through these emails. Just do it and you'll save yourself a stack of time.

Consider Working From Home

Another sensible one that a lot of people don't take into account seriously is the ability to work from home. If you can work from home even one or two days a week, and you'd normally drive half an hour to work, you've just saved yourself two hours in travel time. That's two hours that you could be spending with the family or, alternatively, two hours that you could be spending working more. That is just saved time. Let alone the saved energies and wear and tears on your car. As per the ATO in Australia, $0.68 per kilometre is currently the going rate that it costs to run your car that the government agrees upon, including depreciation. Now, at $0.68 per kilometre, if you're driving half an hour to work, the last thing you're going to be worrying about is your time. That's quite a bit of coin.In Australia where you can jump on a highway and get to work in half an hour that will be around $68 you are saving per week.

Monitor Supplies

Keep your finger on the pulse with supplies. I can't stress this one strongly enough. We were paying $1400 for a service when we signed up with them in 2011. We had a bit of a look around 2015 and found out that the service costs had gone down considerably and we could've been $450 better off with a competitor. I thought, "Oh, stuff this. I'm going to go to the competitor." When we brought that to the attention of the supplier that we're with, they said, "Oh, no, no. Don't do that. Don't do that. We'll give you the same price." Whoa. That's a bugger, isn't it? I've now been dropped down. I could've been saving hundreds and hundreds of dollars every month, nearly $1,000 every month, just by picking up the phone and having a bit of a call around. Make sure every three to four months you check out what's available to you. Check out what mobile phone plans are out there. Make sure you're not paying too much for your internet. Make sure it suits the ecosystem that you've created around your business. That in itself will give you a significantly higher amount of money earned, saved, or whatever you want to call it straight up.

Give Away Your Stuff!

This is a big one. This one here is something that I think has saved us so much money, and it goes against most beliefs. Give away more stuff. That's right. Give away more. Read the book "The Go-Giver" by Bob Burg. It is an amazing read, and it talks all about adding value to people's lives and helping people out. Give away more than you receive, and you will see it come back tenfold. While that's not inherently from the strict rules of saving money, it in turn will drive more money into your business and it gives you a great mindset and makes you feel really positive.

The Final Word

I would say these are the generalised tips that I would use to save money in a business: automate, integrate, drop your costs down where you can, and be a good person and help give out and around the community.