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20% of businesses survive past their first year, but even managing to stay afloat after that tricky first year doesn’t guarantee long-term success. Lots of factors affect whether or not you’ll be successful in the long term, but how you manage finances is integral to good business sense. Your finance is your bloodline. Even if your business has a big passionate heart, if there is no blood running to it, it simply cannot beat.

One of the most effective ways to ensure your business finances are healthy is to ensure you’re holding on to as much money as possible. Some expenditure is always needed, and money will come in and go out, but there will always be ways to save money that can be better invested elsewhere.

There are always ways to keep your costs streamlined. Here are five wise tips to help you streamline your business costs quickly:

1.Cut Down On Virtual Storage Use

A large unknown financial leak offices often fall victim to is massive virtual storage use they are paying for, but do not need. You might have so much more storage than you need. Identify how much storage you have, how much you are using, how much you could use with processes like virtualisation and then look at cutting that storage down.

2. Streamline Communication

When you streamline communication, you improve everything in your office because communication affects everything. Large organisations can lose over $60,000 a year just because of inadequate communication. Poor communication has such a far-reaching effect, offices don’t realise just how much it puts their business in danger, and how many resources it wastes. Bad communication effects:

  • Productivity
  • Morale
  • Customer service
  • Sales
  • Management effectiveness
  • Process effectiveness
  • Staff retention
  • Employing new staff

Communication is such a far-reaching element of business it should always be at the forefront of your mind if you want to make improvements to the way your business works. You can save a lot of money just by improving communication in a few areas.

3. Cut Down On Paper Usage

Paper costs your business money in many different ways. Paper costs money because:

  • You have to buy it
  • Printing costs
  • Recycling costs
  • Paperwork storage in the office (cost of not using that space for other things)
  • Offsite paper storage

In the future, as eco-laws become more tight and targeted, you may even have to pay a tax for the paper you use and how you dispose of it. Paper usage in offices is a really big problem as:

  • 16% of space in landfills is taken up by paper.
  • 45% of office paper ends up in the trash by the end of the day.
  • Just one employee in an office uses 10,000 sheets of paper every year.
  • The US uses 30% of the world’s paper.
  • 4,000,000,000 trees are cut down every year to make paper.

With statistics like those, we should all expect the rules and laws around paper wastage to be tightened in the years to come. So, there are many reasons to streamline your paper usage in the office and hopefully, eventually end up paperless. To streamline your paper usage, you’ll need to approach the problem from various angles. You will need to first cut down how much paper is being used and then look at cutting down the costs of the paper you do need. You can set up offsite storage for important documents you cannot digitise or destroy to make the most of expensive office space. You could also streamline processes where paper is currently used, switching it to digital systems. It will be a long process of change because paper is an office staple, but it will be a effective way of saving money for your business.

4. Ask Your Staff

We can often believe we know everything there is to know about the office we work in. However, if you’re not on the frontline, you’re probably missing a ton of information that could be making huge changes to your bottom line. Reach out to your employees to find out ways they might have noticed processes waste money or resources. You’ll be surprised how much information they have to give you.

5. Outsource Jobs

Outsourcing can save a lot of money in certain scenarios. Usually, if a person needs special training, or you need to hire somebody long term just for one project, it is really beneficial to instead opt for outsourcing. For example: if you need security software updates on your computers, rather than hiring an IT person permanently who can do it, outsource the job to a reputable company like FloridaPro who specialise in repairs to Mac devices. They will do an amazing job and get paid just for that job, no need to get them on the payroll. There are probably many jobs you can outsource just like this, saving you lots of money and time.

Taking the time and effort to think about how you can get your office spending in better shape is a really wise decision in a ruthless and highly competitive worldwide business climate. Streamlining your office costs will not only help you save money, but it will provide a better financial forecast for your business in the future.