Cutting your IT budget

I want to help you save Cash and I am never going to ask you for anything in return.

Every year I save a lot of euros by not spending any money on software. I discovered there was a better way as a result of being frustrated by Sage Software being out of my range. I have learned that I can do most of the day to day tasks efficiently using tools that cost me nothing. It amazes me why they dont teach this stuff in business classes. Talk to the wisest and brightest people you know who work for or run a small business and they wont know the facts I share with you in this article.

Do these 3 things right away to start saving money.

* 10 minutes/day search on one term ie free wordprocessor.
* Record your findings using the free service from evernote.com.
* Spend just ten minutes on every day on trying out one of the packages you find.

I would do this exercise for about one month to get a list together and implement all of the software you nedd. To help you get a head start here are some of the tools I have found and use on a regular basis.

Below in the right hand column you will find the software that you probably have purchased or recognize and on the left you will find the software that will not cost you a thing.

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 blog this and help you out.

More soon…