Reducing the unreduceable

As the gloom of the economy worsens we find ourselves looking closer and closer at what we spend each month within our business to see if we can cut back just a little more on our expenditure.

The obvious areas have already been looked at – reducing training budgets, buy less stationery, limit the entertaining – but there are always entries in your accounts that seem to be untouchable. But are they?

Here are a few areas where you can influence your expenditure where perhaps you thought you could not –

Business Rates – the “Council tax” for business and a payment we begrudgingly make each month. If you are a small business you need to make sure you have been receiving the small business relief available on you business rates. If you are a larger business paying over £20,000 p.a. on business rates you may want to investigate an appeal against your rates. Such appeals are carried out, on the whole, by firms of surveyors usually on a no save no fee basis. User a reputable firm as appeals could lead to increases too!

Water Rates – if your water rates are not calculated through a meter you may want to ask your water company to review your expenditure with them. As with business rates above there is not always a saving to be made however sometimes you can find that you are actually being billed for adjoining or unrelated properties.

Postage – surely the price of the stamp is the same wherever? No it is not – to start with if you frank your mail you get a discount of at least 2p per letter, and if you send large volumes of post by Royal Mail then you may qualify for one of their numerous mail discount schemes which can give you savings of 10%+ (www.royalmail.com).  If you use DX then look at their new software product that ensures your address database is fully up to date with correct DX addresses maximising how much you send through DX (www.afd.co.uk/dxaddressbook)

BT Line Rental - maybe not as obvious as the others but a large majority of you will have BT lines into your offices where you are paying BT for the line rental. If you allow another telecoms provider to invoice you for the rental they can do so for up to 15% less even though the line and number remains the same and if there is a fault BT will fix it.