We’re so used to paying subscription fees for everything today but not really owning anything. I was speaking with Brian from Spina Coffee Roaster in Morisset and he reminded me when small businesses could buy MYOB AccountRight and then only upgrade if they wanted too.
I recall the first subscriptions that MYOB introduced relating to Payroll tax tables. If the PAYG brackets or superannuation (covered in the MYOB Payroll Course) were changed by the Australian Government then you had to buy the upgrade from MYOB – even though it was a simple change of a couple of percentages in the software.
Now, most small businesses don’t even budge when they pay $1000pa for a Xero subscription!
It’s topical now when most small businesses are looking at ways of cutting their expenses. Even more topical when you start looking at your own finances (see the Microsoft Excel Course with household budget) and need to cut back because of the extra interest payments you might be making on your mortgage.
Let’s take a look at some of these costs:
Spotify is a very interesting concept because if you cancel your subscription you have NO music. It’s not like you still have a collection of your favourite CD’s and a CD player.
In the good ‘ol days you owned the physical assets and could use them as much as you wanted without paying anything extra! We all probably spent a lot more money and listened to the same songs over and over but at lease we owned the CD’s (or vinyl records)
Yes, it’s true that you can still use the free version of Spotify and I guess that is good enough.
What about if you couldn’t afford to keep paying for Xero, what are your other options? Yes, I understand that if you can’t afford $1000pa on accounting software then you probably don’t have staff and your business isn’t going the best but it still brings up the question.
Most micro businesses would then downgrade to a smaller version of the software if possible for start using a low cost accounting program.
The purpose of running financial reports and creating budgets and forecasts is to highlight important information so you can perform some data analysis. Using Microsoft Excel you can then use features like conditional formatting to quickly chart and highlight anomalies in the data.
The most obvious things to cut down on are the things that you can do yourself without too much worry. Like buying a coffee when you can make one in the office and buying less little food treats and eat more sandwiches.
Most businesses tend to cut down on marketing and advertising from my understanding and they probably do that because it is the great unknown – you don’t know how successful the advertising is going to be.
If you don’t already have solar panels you might find now is a good time to have them installed to help reduce the cost of electricity. This is the type of decision you can make analysing financial reports or your own person budget.
Even Microsoft now offer their Microsoft Office software for an annual subscription – but it’s a fair bit cheaper than most accounting software plans.
To help out with the costs of learning Microsoft Office our Complete Courses in Word and Excel are discounted and so too is the Microsoft Office Academy COMPLETE training course “Combination” Package.
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