51 Ways to Save Money

Times are tough. And you do not need us to tell you that. The signs are all around you. Your budgets have been cut, and you are under pressure to save even more. One way is to cut investments. But that can have long-term negative implications that you would rather not have. So, how do you tighten your belt without sacrificing productivity and quality? This is where your IT setup should come to your aid. You should be able to leverage your IT infrastructure to deliver savings not only in IT itself, but also in other areas of your business. In this issue, we outline 51ways to save money. Some of them lead to direct savings of expenditure. Some of them will help you to defer investments for some more time. And some will help you to improve productivity all around. It is one thing to advise, and yet another to practice what you preach. Let us begin with what we are preaching. Let us keep this introduction brief, saving your time (and also some paper).

Use ISDN instead of dial-up

Search the Net for travel discounts

Scan and mail files

Upgrade instead of discard

Use PC-sharing kits

Use integrated motherboards

Refill cartridges

Photocopy prints

Avoid color Prints

Print at low resolution

If you are a small office with a dial-up connection and want to add more bandwidth, the obvious choice would be to buy one more modem and dedicate another telephone line to the task.
Don’t. Switch to an ISDN connection instead. Why? First, when you add another modem and a telephone line, you also end up paying the call charges incurred on the second line, and could end up paying more overall.
Second, using two or more dial-up lines will not speed up large downloads, as the bandwidths are still separate. Using ISDN will. Third, call charges on ISDN are the same as those of a regular dial-up line, and yet it gives faster and more stable connects. You will not lose productivity from those frequent disconnects experienced with regular dial-up lines.

Save: Telephone charges; and time as faster and stable connects allow you to achieve more

If you’re a frequent traveler, airline discounts are definitely something you need. Scout around and you’ll find many websites that offer special flight rates, deals, and travel discounts. Use these to get an idea of the amount you’ll have to shell out for a particular journey. Then check with your travel agent to see if you can get a better rate. This is what we did and found that a website was giving an Air France Delhi-London-Delhi ticket for Rs 28,000. However, a quick call to a travel agent got us a rate of Rs 26,000—a saving of Rs 2,000.
You can begin you search with www.travelmartindia.com/ (travel portal for India). Other useful sites include:

Instead of sending documents by courier, scan them and convert to JPEG images, and then e-mail them. JPEG images aren’t very large in size, and hence don’t take very long to transmit or download on the other end. Plus, if your company already has an Internet connection, you will not spend anything extra in mailing the document.

Save: Between Rs 100 to Rs 40, depending on your courier company, for a 0.5 kg package on Delhi-Mumbai (most courier companies have a minimum rate beginning at 0.5 kg)

What does your company do with old hardware? Discard it? Don’t. A little refurbishing will extend its life considerably. Or at least make these old machines useful in other jobs (as print servers, Internet gateways, or cache servers). Specific areas of upgrade that can breathe fresh life into an old system include more RAM and a better hard disk. Both of these cost significantly less that what a fresh PC would cost.

Save: Money that you would’ve spent on new machines

Put those old monitors to use and save on buying a new PC by using PC-sharing kits. These comprise a set of hardware, which lets you attach a monitor and a keyboard to an existing PC, so you end up with two working PCs. www.adlinesystems.com/product.html is a link to an Indian company that sells such a product called Applica 2000. This costs about Rs 10,000, which is significantly lower to the cost of a new PC (Rs 30–50,000)

For productivity applications (word processing, e-mail, small spreadsheets), opt for PCs with sound, video, network, and modem integrated on the motherboard. Approximate prices for entry-level versions of these are Rs 800 each for a sound and network card, Rs 700 for an internal modem, and about Rs 1,500 for an AGP display card). This amounts to a maximum of Rs 3,800 of saving per PC. However, since a motherboard with these functions integrated costs a little more than a motherboard without them, your savings will be somewhat less than the Rs 3,800 we’ve calculated. Plus, of you don’t want all those functions integrated and would rather buy separate add-on cards, the cost saving will come down further. While on the topic, if you opt for processors that are one step slower than the current topper, you stand to save some money. For most office applications, a Celeron or Duron, is good enough, and will cost you much less than the hottest processor around.

This one will make printer companies extremely angry. After all, a considerable part of their earnings come from cartridges and they wouldn’t want to lose that.

We’ve worked for years now with laser printers from various companies that use refilled cartridges, and have not come to grief. There is no reason why you should also not switch to refilled cartridges.

If you print using an inkjet printer and want to print multiple black-and-white copies of a document, it is cheaper to photocopy instead. A photocopy costs about 60 paise (bulk rates) while an inkjet printout costs about a rupee.

Save: 40 percent of the cost of printing multiple copies on an inkjet

On a color inkjet printer, a page printed in vibrant colors can cost many times what it would cost to print the same page in black. So, if you are taking draft copies, then print in black, instead of color. You can do this from the printer driver, by clicking on the Properties button next to the selected printer in the print dialog of any software. If you have no choice but to print in color, print at lower quality (see idea 20).

Save your printer’s toner or ink by printing in low resolution. Adjust your printer’s resolution to low by going to Control Panel>Printers and right-clicking and selecting properties of the printer. Depending on the printer you have, you’ll find you can choose from many resolutions. For text prints, even the lowest resolution is sufficient.
You can also set the resolution on the printer itself. This way, everyone will not have to change their printer settings. Apart from this, look for options like Toner save, or other Quality settings features in your printer drivers, which can reduce the amount of toner or ink used.

Save: Toner or ink and time (documents at lower resolution take less time to print)