Software on a shoestring

Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 1:10 am

Cutting your software budget

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

Every year I save thousands of pounds by not spending any money on software. It was the quote containing the Sage Softwarethat caused a friend to call me up and ask if I could help me get a better deal on software for his business – hence this article. I now know it is entirely possible to run my business on free software. Only the Lord knows why this stuff isn’t evryday knowledge for most business folks. The majority of small business people I come into contact dont know anything about this subject and thats a tragedy.

Do these 3 things right away to start saving money.

* Use 10 mins every working day to use Google to find the tools you need.
* Go get yourself a free copy of Evernote (it’s free, just serach Google).
* Just spend about ten minutes every day trying out your findings.

It took me about for weeks on and off spending max twenty minutes a day to discover all of the tools I am ever going to need. This are some of my favorites just to get you started and help you discover what is possible.

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).

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

Teleseminars