End-of-Year Business Tuesday Tips #2: Investing in Products and Services for the New Year

In last week’s blog, we gave you some tips for making an end-of-year assessment of your company’s equipment and processes. The three big points were:

• Make sure your current hardware is operating as well as it can.
• Review your annual budget and see where you’re spending your time and money.
• Go over any problems you had or complaints you received over the past year.

Once you’ve figured out your current state of affairs, you can start thinking about the future. You can begin to look for ways to make your workflows more productive and trim away your expenses.

Here are a couple of questions to ask as you’re preparing to invest in products and services for the future:

How Can You Save More?

Take another look at your budget and start asking if you can possibly cut down certain items. For example, see how much you’re spending on printing supplies and paper:

• Did you really need to purchase or use so much?
• How many documents printed did you actually use?
• Do you have supplies gathering dust in your closets and cabinets?

The answers you find to questions like these could help you rein in your printing expenses next year. Our Managed Print Services could help you gather this information if you’re having trouble doing it yourself.

How Can You Work Better?

After you’ve thought about your budget, give some thought to your daily operations as a whole:

• Which issues take up the most of your IT staff’s time?
• Which tasks take the longest time to accomplish?
• Do you or your employees have trouble keeping track of information?

The answers to these questions could point towards some adjustments you may need to make to your workflows. For instance, you might consider switching from storing physical documents to digital files to make it easier to find your important records. We’ll look at some ways to manage your budget and improve your efficiency in upcoming blogs.