Posts Tagged ‘cuttiing expenses’
Cutting the Dead Weight: 5 Expenses to Cut When Your Business Needs Cash
Monday, November 19th, 2007
f you own a small business, you know that all those expenses can slowly creep up on you - until suddenly you feel in over your head. Don’t worry, you’re not alone - plenty of business owners have been in the same situation and have stayed afloat by cutting some of their expenses.
For a small business, there probably isn’t going to be a single big expense that will miraculously result in a windfall of cash. Rather, it’s all those small expenses that add up each month. Every business is different, with various expenses that should be looked at carefully and analyzed to see if they could be cut or reduced. Here’s a list of some of the more common expenses that many small businesses should take a second look at in times of low cash flow:
Reducing these 5 expenses could result
in a hidden cash flow for your business!
Credit card options - Having a merchant account to accept credit cards is expensive, and if your online business isn’t doing tens of thousands of dollars in sales each month, then perhaps you don’t need one. That doesn’t mean that you won’t accept credit cards, because companies like Paypal, Clickbank or 2Checkout offer credit card services without a steep monthly fee. Those companies get paid by receiving a small percentage of each credit card transaction. If you look at your options, you may easily be able to save several hundred dollars each year!
Phone service - Have you compared your long distance phone service to other companies on the market lately? There is a ton of competition, and long distance service is cheaper than ever. You can even get super-cheap rates from popular internet and VOIP phone line companies like Vonage and Skype. Go online and compare rates - chances are you are paying a lot more money each month then you need to.
Phone numbers - This is a time to get realistic. Do you really need that 1-800 number? Are all those cell phones necessary? How many business lines do you have? Do you need them all? All those numbers add up quickly, so take a hard look at each and see what can be cut loose.
Internet options - Just like phone service, there’s a wealth of internet options as well: cable, DSL, fiber optics, T1, T3. Compare your rate to the rates offered by your local cable and phone companies and then do an online search as well.
Storage Fees - If your products are being stored by a fulfillment house, you may be unaware at how fast all the costs add up. There’s shipping fees, handling fees, per item fees, incoming fees, outgoing fees, etc. Check their rates against other fulfillment houses. It may be cheaper to send your next shipment of goods to another warehouse with lower fees. Finding a cheaper fulfillment house can easily save you several thousand dollars per year if you stock a large number of items.
So, while these expenses may not be equivalent to a HUGE savings, they can still add up to quite a bit. And, for a small business, keeping monthly expenses low is key to staying afloat. Plus, once you see what a big difference comparing costs makes, you’ll be sure to check around first before committing to new expenses.
Tags: Accounting, Carrie Hinkel, cash flow, cuttiing expenses, cutting costs, Finance and Accounting, money
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