Cut Your Office Costs with These Big Ideas

If you don’t pay attention to your office overheads, they can get away from you. But keeping them down can benefit you, even if you can afford to pay a lot now.

You could be unexpectedly thrown into tough times and unable to afford your once extravagant offices. By keeping your costs down now, you can avoid having to do drastic things when you suddenly can no longer afford the prices you were paying.

Business Offers and Deals

Make sure that when you buy equipment for your office and employees you take advantage of any business offers. You can buy many products as a business, even if you don’t have many employees. You could get great deals on computers, mobile phones, software and even office furniture.

Save on Energy Costs

Energy is a big expense in both homes and businesses, with prices on the rise. Saving on your business’s energy costs will save you money and have the bonus of making your company greener. One way to cut costs is to switch business electricity providers. You can also limit energy use by turning off lights more, using the phone less and limiting the use of printers. Replace light bulbs with energy saving ones and make sure you shut everything down when everyone leaves the office.

Downsize

Don’t downsize your staff, but downsize your office. Do you really need a big office all of the time? Many smaller businesses can get away with using a smaller office or renting a co-working space. In fact, some can have at least a few workers work from home. If you can communicate with your team over the phone and internet, working from home will cut costs. Even with expenses factored in. You can have occasional days when you hire an office or co-working space to meet in person.

Cut Stationery and Printing Costs

Printing can become very expensive if you’re doing a lot of it. The cost of ink and paper will add up to extraordinary amounts if you print unnecessarily. Move everything that you can to an online system. You can implement an office policy on only printing when absolutely necessary. There are lots of easy ways to share documents without printing them or even emailing them. Use a cloud system like Google Docs or Dropbox to share between teams. Google Docs can save you money on word processing software too.

Use computers to cut down on other stationery costs too. The less people are writing things on paper, the less you need to buy it, along with pens, pencils and other materials. Use projectors instead of paper flip-boards and invest in tablets instead of paper notebooks. For supplies that you just can’t cut back on, find a low-cost supplier you can trust.

If you need to cut down your expenses but feel like you can’t change anything, look very carefully at your finances and think creatively. You might find that you can cut costs easily with a little flexibility.