5 Ways New Businesses Can Use Technology to Reduce Operational Costs

Businesses are always trying to find ways to save money without hurting the quality of their product or services. One of the best ways to do this is to reduce your overhead. There are many ways that businesses can do that, fortunately. And one of the best ways is to leverage technology tools. Let’s take a look at a few ways your organization could use technology to drive operational costs down.

Use a Better Payment Processing Solution

A lot of new business owners have difficulties navigating payment processing solutions. They might not like the rigidity of legacy systems and the hurdles they have to go through. This pushes a lot of them to go for third-party solutions such as Square for instance.

The issue with these is that there are often very limited. Square as an example is much more geared towards products than services. So, you might have to add some modules as you go if you’re in a certain industry, and these can cost a lot.

A better option would be to go for a service that can design a custom solution for you, like https://accreditedinterchange.com/. That way you can have a payment processing solution tailor-made for your business that will run more efficiently and have fewer fees and hidden costs.

Automate as Much as You Can

The industrial revolution showed us how much automation can boost production, and you should use it in your operation wherever you can as well. We understand that you’re not running a Tesla plant, but there are tons of menial tasks that could be automated and save you and your staff time.

Tools like Xero or FreshBooks could help automate a lot of your bookkeeping. Custom payment processing tools as we mentioned earlier can also be designed to automatically invoice clients and have payments linked to bookkeeping software, which could allow you to save money and even reduce your headcount.

Smart Lighting and Heating

If you aren’t using smart tools in your facility, then you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. Smart lighting tools can be used to only light areas when they need to. There is no reason for all the hallways in a building to be on 24/7. Smart lights with sensors will allow them to be lit whenever someone comes in and could make a huge difference after a while.

Smart heating can be used in the same way. If you want you and your employees to feel comfortable when coming in, you don’t have to leave the heat on overnight. You could use a smart thermostat to time heating so that the temperature will be just right. You can also set it to close a few hours before you leave, so you can benefit from that residual heat.

Implement a BYOD Policy

If you want to save on hardware costs, you should also consider letting your employees use their own devices. Not only will you not have to spend as much on things like work mobiles and laptops, but people tend to take care of their devices more than a company’s, so that would allow you to cut replacement costs as well.

There’s another way that you could save by implementing a BYOD policy. There’s a learning curve associated with any new device, and you won’t have to train your employees on how to use the devices that they own.

Move to the Cloud

A lot of your IT infrastructure could be moved to the cloud. There is no need to own your servers, store data on-site, or host the software that you use. All of these things can be done through the cloud and migration could save you money on hardware and energy.

Not to mention the added security it offers. Third-party data centers make sure that their servers are safe from physical damage at all times and will perform routine backups as well. No more having to worry about natural disasters or human errors destroying data or your systems.

These are all ways that technology could help you cut your business’s operational costs. All of these are fairly easy to implement as well, so don’t feel intimidated and give them a closer look.