Reducing Costs for Home Office

Entrepreneurs and small business owners are often faced with the hard choice between investing in an idea they are certain would work and the logical aspect of keeping costs down. You need to think about purchasing bulk office supplies, cutting employee work hours, and etc. to help reduce your office costs. For every company, keeping the running costs down is always a high priority but for small business, it is something essential. Here are easy tips on how you can reduce cost for your home office.

• Consider a virtual office. A business always needs a physical address or a meeting room from time to time and through a virtual office, you can have both. A virtual office allows you to work from home or any other location but for branding and suppliers’ sake, your physical address must appear (you can address this to your home office). Mails are often forwarded to a physical address and you wouldn’t want to miss that.

• Use third party contractors. Instead of employing an in house staff (which is often very expensive), hire a freelance contract with services like Odesk and Elance. Odesk is a global service marketplace where you can hire, manage and pay remote freelancers or teams. These sites offer you the option to hire people on a per project basis or only when you need that extra help.

• Cut communication costs. While communication is crucial for the success of a business, it does come with a cost. Today, there are VoIP (voice over internet protocol) services that will let you save money from telephone lines to faxing documents. Skype offers personal line numbers that can be renewed on a monthly basis. Gmail lets you send and receive business emails through your very own address.

• Purchase bulk office supplies from stationery wholesalers. Consider purchasing in large amounts for office supplies that you always use such as bond paper, pens, printer ink and etc.

• Hire family, friends and even students. From time to time, you may need someone around your home office from picking up customer service and inquiry calls to answering emails. You can hire a local talent from any of your family members to students in a nearby local college. Community colleges often have internship programs which is a ‘win-win’ situation for your business. Hiring family members and maybe your older kids teaches them about responsibility.