Cutting your computing costs

I want to help you save money and I am never going to ask you for a penny in return.

Every year I save hundreds of euros by not spending any money on software. It was the Sage Software that pushed me over the edge one afternoon and drove me to look for a better deal for systems to run my business. I know that I can do most of the essential tasks in my business on high quality software that costs $0. They dont teach this at Harvard. The majority of small business people I come into contact dont know anything about this subject and thats a tragedy.

I just follow these three steps to get the free tools.

* Take just ten minutes each day to search for just one tool type.
* Use Evernote (free at www.evernote.com) to record your findings.
* Spend just ten minutes on every day on trying out one of the packages you find.

Keep this up for just four weeks and you will have a really good selection of free tools you can use to get things done in your business. OK, fast start for you a small selection of the tools I use everyday that work well and you should take a look at.

Chances are you have heard or are using the software tools I have listed on the right, I have done this to help you easily identify the tools you may want to evaluate as replacements which are listed on the left.

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 inspiration!motivation to blog this and help you out.

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