In these hard pressed times, people seem to be holding their breath as regards the recession. While there are plenty of people willing to say it’s here, few seem willing to predict how long it will last. Estimates vary, for its duration, from a year or so to far beyond.
What is easier to advise upon is the fact that for small businesses efficiency is paramount. Technology, of course, can help with that.
In the same way that for large enterprises IT has become the de facto guardian of licences, compliance and, if some are to be believed, power consumption, information technology in small business can be used to monitor such things. Following the old axiom of anything that isn’t measured, isn’t managed, a little bit of tracking could provide some very interesting results.
So, where do you start and with what? Well a spreadsheet application is a good starting place because you probably have one already and are probably fairly familiar with using it.
Track your ESB bills via spreadsheet and see where your consumption is highest. It may not be just the winter months, as one might expect. The ability of most spreadsheets to create reports may give you the ability to see a relationship in the data that otherwise might be missed.
Bill tracking for everything from electricity, stationary and marketing to the tea and biscuits, could give you visibility on a spending pattern that otherwise might elude you, allowing you to take control and make efficiencies.
The boon is that as you are tracking relatively small amounts of data, it should not be an onerous task but can still be rewarding.
Now this might sound daft at first, in the manner of teaching an elderly relative to suck eggs, but if you are a small business owner and you can’t recall what your highest electricity bill was in the last 12 months, then you might benefit from such an exercise.
If you find that this strategy is useful and wish to expand upon it, then you can go out and find something that is a bit more sophisticated than a spreadsheet to do the job. A quick web search turns up many offerings for the various tasks.
What you may find then is that with the ability and the well formed habit of tracking such things, may be very useful indeed when it comes to calculating your carbon footprint, assessing your licence status or establishing your regulatory compliance, either for audit or to implement a solution; you have the data there, ready to reveal its worth.
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