February 21st, 2012
A common problem within businesses when it comes to buying goods for themselves is the belief that playing two or more suppliers off against one another will net them the best deal. This is rarely the case!
When a supplier quotes for a business, the prices they quote reflects what they believe your account is worth to them – the larger your account, the lower the prices they will quote, as they look to make a certain return from you.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Chartered Institiue of Purchasing and Supply, consolidation of invoices, cost savings, dutch auction, Group Purchasing, pay invoices less often, procurement
Posted in 33 steps to increase profits, General Cost Saving | No Comments »
January 24th, 2012
If you refer back to our blog post from last year here, you will see that we ran through how to make sure you get the best prices for your core stationery items. Once you have this core list, you can further reduce the costs by looking closely at what items appear on that list.
You will be ordering two types of product – branded such as Concorde, 3M, Bic, Fellowes, or non-branded which either carry the name of your supplier or Connect, Niceday, or Impega.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Banner, best price, Connect, contract price list, cost savings, Impega, Niceday, office products, procurement, stationery
Posted in 33 steps to increase profits, General Cost Saving | No Comments »
January 5th, 2012
The start of a year is always a good time to focus your mind as to how to improve the efficiency of your business. Most business owners spend their Christmas break planning their move to greatness, increasing, sales, increasing, profits, making the most of difficult trading conditions.
No matter what strategies you put in place and what work you undertake on your business there are still areas within your business where additional cost savings/ profit can be found. In a lot of instances it is areas of expenditure that can fall under the radar or be deemed too small to bother with, however if you could reduce these costs by 20% collectively then that would be worth having – wouldn’t it?
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: best price, cost savings, economy of scale, Group Purchasing, pay invoices less often, procurement, relationship buying
Posted in 33 steps to increase profits, General Cost Saving | No Comments »
December 13th, 2011
Postage is often deemed by businesses as an area where they just cannot influence prices, as a lack of competition means that you can just use the Royal Mail.
This is true, as even with the introduction of companies such as TNT and UK Mail into the market they still need to use the Royal Mail for the “final mile” delivery.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: best price, Christmas post, cost savings, last post, Mailsort, procurement, Royal Mail, Royal Mail discounts
Posted in 33 steps to increase profits, General Cost Saving | No Comments »
December 1st, 2011
Even with the advances with in-house printing from your photocopier, there is still a need for professionally printed items as part of your marketing armoury. In years gone by, there was really just one choice – go to your printer and get them to print them on a lithographic printer, with the main factor influencing cost being the standard of print press they used. A two colour machine was more expensive than a four colour machine as the paper had to be fed through twice.
Nowadays, digital print is coming to the forefront as digital presses become more affordable to commercial printers. However, there is still an argument to use litho print as well.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: best price, colour copying, cost savings, economy of scale, Group Purchasing, procurement
Posted in 33 steps to increase profits, General Cost Saving | No Comments »
November 22nd, 2011
At the time of a downturn, prices will increase for two reasons. Firstly, the cost of raw materials, distribution, and finance increases, causing market forces to push prices up, and secondly suppliers decide that it is a good excuse to increase margin and blame it on the “current economy”.
When one of your suppliers approaches you and says “I am very sorry but we must put your prices up because of blah..blah..blah..!” do you always accept this is the case? What if you were to refuse, or even ask for a discount on current prices of say 5%?
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: best price, cost savings, downturn, price increases, raw materials, recession
Posted in 33 steps to increase profits, General Cost Saving | No Comments »
November 16th, 2011
If you have less than 10 employees and use the phone(!) then there are changes being brought in by Ofcom that you need to be aware of – it could seriously advantage your business.
The UK telecom industry has long sought ways to retain their customers with minimal effort on their own behalf. One of the most successful way of achieving this is to sign up businesses of all sizes on rolling contracts with very restrictive termination clauses. This means that unless you remember to advise your supplier that you are leaving within, usually, a 30 day window then your contract will rollover, and you must wait another 12 months to get out of it.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: business telecoms, contract roll over, cost savings, line rental, Ofcom
Posted in General telecoms, Telecom companies, Telecoms Explained | No Comments »
November 14th, 2011
Over the weekend as I worked my way through the papers I came across this advert from T-Mobile. I have to say I read it several times to make sure I had got it right – I get a FREE iPhone 3GS for just £15.32 per month! Now I am well aware that times are hard and everything is becoming devalued however I never expected a shift so extreme where even “free” now costs us money.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: best price, BT, business telecoms, cost savings, iPhone, line rental, mobile phones, mobile tariff, Orange, T-Mobile, Virgin
Posted in General Cost Saving, General telecoms, Telecom companies, Telecoms Explained | No Comments »
November 7th, 2011
According to the Chartered Institute for Purchasing & Supply, the average cost to a business to process an invoice is £42. This has been calculated by adding up the amount of time it takes for one single invoice to work its way from receipt in the office, until the amount is paid to your supplier.
The solution is simply to pay less invoices! Unfortunately this does not mean ignoring payment and they will go away, but means you need to look at who you pay each month, and see if there are any suppliers you pay more than once. If so, ask them if you can consolidate to a single monthly invoice that they send at the end of the month, which incorporates all the orders and deliveries for that calendar month.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: best price, Chartered Institiue of Purchasing and Supply, consolidation of invoices, cost savings, Group Purchasing, pay invoices less often, procurement
Posted in 33 steps to increase profits, General Cost Saving | No Comments »
October 13th, 2011
With the rapid advancement in photocopier technology over recent years, it is almost the norm now to have a black & white and colour copier in the office. The photocopier salespeople have had a great time telling us how we can now produce fantastic full colour professional documents from our machines which will only enhance our business – and lighten the pocket too!
You may or may not know that the cost ratio between a black & white copy and a colour one is roughly 1:10, so it is much more cost efficient to use the B&W setting on the machine.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: black and white, colour copying, computer drivers, cost savings, economy of scale, Group Purchasing, outsourcing, photocopiers, procurement
Posted in 33 steps to increase profits, General Cost Saving | No Comments »
