Cutting your software budget

I want to help you save money and I am not going to ask you for anything in return.

Every year I save a lot of dollars by not spending any money on software. It only took one small event to drive me to look for a better deal and in this case it was Sage Software. Amazing - I am easily doing most of my work using software tools that cost nothing. It amazes me why they dont teach this stuff in business classes. The majority of small business people I come into contact dont know anything about this subject and thats a tragedy.

Like me you can reap the rewards by sticking to these rules.

* Spend ten minutes max per day searching for free tools.
* Go to www.evernote.com and sign up to this free “memory” service.
* Spend 10 mins. everyday giving your findings a very quick try.

Spend just one month on this task and at the end you will have the free software you need and loads of ideas on how you can make your business more cost efficient. To help you get started and prove my point here is a list of tools I use regularly.

To help you start saving money immediately my list is divided into two columns, on the right I have listed the software programs you may have purchased or are already using and on the left I have listed the free software.

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 blog this and help you out.

I will be publishing a long list here in the near future…