The best piece of advice that you’ll get as a small business owner is keeping overheads low. If your spending gets out of control and you start burning through all of your cash too quickly, you’re going to be in big trouble.
There are a lot of simple ways to cut your overheads like downgrading your office space or getting rid of employees but that will affect your ability to do business and you won’t be able to grow as easily. But there are ways to cut costs without making any sacrifices to the business. If you’re struggling to manage your cash flow, just make these simple changes.
Take More Card Payments
Whenever you take cash to the bank, you have to pay handling fees that eat into your profits. But if you take payments on card, you don’t have to pay that percentage. That’s why you should make sure that you’ve got a good credit card machine and you encourage your customers to pay with card instead of cash, perhaps by giving them a small discount.
That doesn’t mean you should stop taking cash payments though because you’re alienating some of your customers. But you should be encouraging people to pay electronically as much as possible.
Change Your Phone System
The charges for landline phone calls are pretty expensive but they’re a necessary cost, right? Actually, there are some better alternatives available that will save you money and could even improve the service at the same time. You should get rid of the outdated landline system and switch to an online service like Skype instead. It’ll save you so much money, especially if you’re making international calls on a regular basis.
Pay Invoices Early
There are certain expenses that you simply can’t avoid, but you can save money on those bills if you pay your invoices early. A lot of companies offer a discount for early payment so you should take advantage of it. If you’re paying early, you’ll be on top of all of the bills and all of those savings can quickly add up.
Negotiate Interest Rates
Chances are, you borrowed some money to get the business going and repayments on that loan are one of your biggest expenses. You can’t avoid that but you might be able to save yourself some money if you negotiate the interest rates. Most people don’t realize that this is an option and sometimes, your creditors will flat out refuse. But you won’t know unless you ask. If you just call them up and see if there is anything that they can do for you, you might be surprised.
If you can’t negotiate a new rate, it might be worth shopping around for better deals. If you can get a zero interest credit card and transfer the balance over, you’ll be able to stop those interest payments for a while until you’ve paid down the debt.
Cutting business costs doesn’t have to mean making big sacrifices that disrupt operations. If you make these simple changes instead, you can save a lot of money without affecting your ability to do business.