Control costs and increase your bottom line

James Devlin, Head of Business Sales BT, says all businesses can thrive in the current climate with accurate planning and careful spending at the forefront of business decisions.

What are the best ways to control costs? IT and communications spend can be reduced through such simple measures as making more calls using VoIP (internet) telephony, consolidating suppliers and having a clearer understanding of your communications and IT bills. The added benefit of having one communications and IT supplier will put you in a stronger position to take advantage of the upturn when it comes.  

I'm also a huge fan of flexible working. If you haven't considered how it can take costs out of your business, take a look at how it could change how you actually work. If your business is fortunate enough to have extensive mobile broadband and Wi-Fi coverage, this can be used to your advantage to facilitate a flexible working situation. Being as accessible to colleagues, customers and partners out of the office as you would be in it, is a critical way to steal a march on your competitors during this time. 

Flexible working can cut travel costs, cut your carbon footprint, manage your people more efficiently, improve their morale and give them a compelling reason to stay with you.  At BT Group, we currently have 64,000 flexible workers and 11,500 contracted full-time home workers across the world. We have witnessed a 20 per cent increase in productivity by putting smarter working practices in place.

These practices include:

1.  
   1. Have a comprehensive check up: Understand in detail how your business incurs its IT and telecoms bills to cut costs. Find a solution that helps you look at bill itemisation, spot trends and manage resources accordingly.
   2. Get out there: Join an online community like BT Tradespace to enable you to network - and trade - with like-minded businesses
   3. Be more agile: Cut the need to travel and save against fuel costs by moving to conference calls rather than face to face meetings. Flexible working can help you to manage your workforce more efficiently, reduce costs, improve morale and keep hold of your most important asset - your employees.
   4. Make sure you have the support you need: Subscribe to on-line support reducing the need for and the cost of full-time on-site IT staff
   5. Work everything together:  Unified communications packages allow you to integrate applications on a single platform or device ,  helping you to cut costs.
   6. Take every opportunity: The credit crunch might be restricting your access to finance but BT Business offers very attractive credit terms to help your business be more effective and reach more customers.
   7. Stay ahead of the pack: BT Business Insight (insight.bt.com) offers businesses a wealth of free advice and support.
   8. Make every penny count: A program such as BT Billing Analyst can help you to better understand your telephone charges, and the result is often consolidation of lines, calls and mobiles, which can reduce overall cost.

Controlling costs in difficult economic conditions is a simple way to improve a company's bottom line and get fit for better business in 2010.