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 hundreds of dollars by not spending any money on software. I wanted to find a more economic way of getting systems for my business – a move inspired by the Sage Software in a quote I had received. I now know it is entirely possible to run my business on free software. They dont teach this at Harvard. Even the most savvy of small business people know very little about the methods I am give you here.

To get the fastest benefit from this approach do the following.

* Each working day spend 10 mins searching for a specific tool.
* Go get yourself a free copy of Evernote (it’s free, just serach Google).
* Set aside ten minutes every day to experiment with what you find.

I recommend you do this for one month to establish a list and implement all of the tools you might require to runn your business. To get you going here is a small sample of the tools I use every day to get the job done.

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 desire to write this up and help you out.

Come back soon as I will be adding more insights here…