Everybody manages different things in their business, and we all have different ways of going about doing our job, but that doesn’t mean we can’t all have some type of budget in place.
In order to keep your business running smoothly, chunking down your expenses is a great way to limit your spending. If you don’t have a financial fund set up to accommodate your business’ expenses, it will be an immediate waste of money to your business, and there is not much you can do about it.
There is however, a bit of an art to budgeting. If you don’t have the right information, you may pay more money for business supplies than you want to. In order to avoid this, you can pretend you didn’t have a budget all together and use common sense. Observe how the products you use normally sell and buy accordingly by seeing if you can negotiate a better price and/or percentage off a per item deal.
If your business is becoming more of a black hole for your finances, a budget by no means is enough. You need to look into ways that you can control the way your business spends. This can change the way that you handle expenditures. It can also help to revamp your staff if your staff are already spending too much time on their own. If your staff is free to spend time with other people at work more than they are paying you, this could improve productivity. If you have a sales person who is spending as much time dealing with paperwork as they do on making sales (and this makes sense on your end), you need to help them identify ways to deal with mundane tasks like paperwork, and try to get them cut out of the mundane tasks. If you have a customer service agent who has high employee turnover, you might want to consider setting a new target that much higher for employee turnover.
So do yourself a favor, and take the time out to make a budget. Once you have your financial document in place, it’s time to look at lower cost alternatives to keep your cash flow going.
If you’re getting more customers, office supplies is a great cost saving idea. Although you would typically pay a slightly more for office supplies if your needed items were portable, and if you request that they come in bulk orders, a lower price per item will typically offset the higher expense.
If you have a corporate expense account, it is going to be a gold mine for your business if you utilize it. However, there are numerous alternatives for using corporate expense accounts. It is important you understand affordable alternatives to the corporate expense account that are right for your company. For example, maybe you work in a small showroom and can’t afford a corporate expense account, so you need to look into ways to cover smaller purchase expense.
You can also look into purchasing cheaper electronics, if your only mass purchasing is a printer. Managed Print Services actually offer cheap electronics for their clients, but there are also other third party purchasing companies that can lower a company’s expenses a great deal.
The concept of the budgeting budget will give you more flexibility as a business owner. If you have an expense account, you can eliminate unnecessary expenditures that are not needed for your business. This should be the aim of any business owner. Remember, a budget isn’t a bad way to find cheaper alternatives to traditional expenses.
In order to effectively make a budget for your business, it’s imperative to understand how your business works. Get some extra help if necessary, or you don’t need to budget every word out.
