Information Technology on a tight budget?

Cutting your computing budget

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

Every year I save thousands of pounds by not spending any money on software. I was evaluating a system to run my business and I was really disappointed to find Sage Software was going to leave me with no money to spend on the essential tools I need to get the job done. I have learned that I can do most of my key business tasks using free software. It amazes me why they dont teach this stuff in business classes. The tragedy is that just about 90% of small business owners don’t know the facts about the amount of free tools out there.

Just follow these simple steps to find the free tools that are out there.

* Use 10 mins every working day to use Google to find the tools you need.
* Capture the detail of everything you find (and your experiences) on Evernote.com (10 minutes each day evaluating your findings).
* It should take you about a month to find all of the tools you will ever need and be up and running on free software.

To get what I am talking about here try these tools now, I use then all the time and they work well. OK, this is easy on the right I have listed the paid for equivalents to the free software tools you can start using immediately at zero costs (please note that some of these may have “upgrades” that offer more features at a cost).

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

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

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