With the current economic climate, small business owners need to make sure their businesses are running as efficiently as possible. These ideas help ensure that your business is not spending more than is necessary on IT solutions.
1) Email
Thunderbird for your email
One of the most popular email clients in use today is Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. But one costs money and the other has a reduced set of functionality. Luckily, there are now several viable email solutions available for free.
If you like having your emails stored locally on your PC like Outlook, then Mozilla Thunderbird may just save you a chunk of money. With the recently released 2nd version offering much more functionality and security than Outlook Express, its a definately worth a look:
GoogleMail
Alternatively, if you want to be able to access your email from anywhere in the world and the ability to store every email you ever send and receive, GoogleMail may be the solution. GoogleMail is completely free, you can manage multiple email addresses through one account and you get unlimited storage at no cost. This gives the added benefit of ensuring that your emails are safely backed up and stored outside of your office. should the worse happen and one or more of your computers fail, you can be safe in the knowledge that your email is backed up, safely stored and you can go on receiving and sending mail from any Internet connected computer. GoogleMail also boasts excellent spam filtering and the ability to access your mail from mobile devices.
2) Office Software
OpenOffice
Again, Microsoft are the most well known provider of office software with MS Office, but the cost can be significant. Happily, it doesn’t have to be expensive to have top class office software as Sun Microsystems provide an excellent alternative to MS Office.
Sun Microsystems offering is called OpenOffice and perhaps is the best alternative to MS Office. Its completely free and the package contains a Word processor (i.e. MS Word equivalent), a spreedsheet program (Excel alternative), presentation software (Powerpoint alternative), a graphics/drawing program and a full database program (MS Access alternative). This really does offer a viable solution to the Microsoft suite.
To find out more visit Why Open Office? and find out why you should consider OpenOffice.
3) Anti-Virus/Computer Protection
Whilst there are lots of paid solutions for anti-virus, the costs can be prohibitive when you have several computers to protect. ClamWin Antivirus is a free solution, that provides protection on a par with many of the paid solutions.
4) Bookkeeping, Project Management and Invoicing
FreeAgentCentral Accounts, Book Keeping and Project Management
This is a difficult topic and trying to get software to manage each of these areas can be very expensive. Getting your financials for the year into a good position for your accountant can be time consuming, plus there is an additional cost of maintaining a suitably secure filing system. FreeAgentCentral is an online solution to all of this problems, allowing you to manage your clients, projects, time tracking and invoicing all on one system. You can upload your bank statements and match payments to invoices and receipts and then have the majority of your end of year accounts automatically generated by the system.
Although there is a cost associated, at £250 a year, this piece of software represents a big saving just on accountancy fees alone.
Find out more at FreeAgentCentral.com.
5) Backup and data management
Carbonite Backup
We all appreciate the need to have a good backup solution in place, but often prohibitive costs of backup solutions and configurations mean that backup solutions and disaster recovery is often something that gets put off till another day. Unfortunately, a disaster can strike at any time and even something as common as a computer hard disk failure can be devastating for a small business.
Ribit Solutions have just begun using Carbonite’s online backup service. Its a $55 flat fee for the year, and you can back up as much as you like. Its completely automatic, safe and secure and simple to setup. Once the program is installed on your PC, you just mark which files you want backed up and the software takes care of everything else. By default, the program will keep your files backed up as you work, so once you’ve created a new file or changed a document, Carbonite uploads it to their secure servers in the background while you carry on working. This way, if your computer dies, you have a power cut etc, you can easily select the file you want to restore and Carbonite will get the latest version back for you.
Find out more at the Carbonite website
For more information or for help getting started with any of these services, please contact Ribit Solutions
