How to increase profits by lowering your bills

Every business wants to increase their profits and many people think that the best way to increase your profits is to increase your sales. But there is a small problem with that. If you do increase your sales you are going to increase the costs of running a business because of the increase in the amount of work that is now having to be done. So that leaves with you with one other option, you must lower your costs in order to increase your profit.

In business there are two kinds of cost types: fixed and variable. Fixed costs are costs that do not change in relation to the amount of production or sales. Fixed costs can include but are not limited to insurance, rent, and utilities. Another thing about fixed costs is that they can become change over time, but the increase and decrease is not related to production. Variable costs are costs that change depending on the activity of the business. A great example of a variable cost is inventory and raw materials. If you are in the retail industry you have to keep inventory on hand and when your sales increase so does the amount of your inventory. The same holds true for raw materials, the more items that you are producing the more raw materials you are going to need.

So now you are probably wondering how to increase your profits by lowering your bills. The answer to this is not cut and dry because you will have to take a look at your entire business to see if you can cut costs without affecting your business in general. It is also good to keep in mind that sometimes you have to spend money to save money; this means you might need to upgrade some of your equipment. Let's take a look at some of the common areas that your business might be able to lower their bills in.

Marketing:
If you are spending a lot of money on marketing you might want to think about cutting back, this is especially true if you are an established company. If your company is already established you will not need to spend as much money in marketing as you did when you were first starting up your company. Another thing to look for is to see if you can do some of the marketing yourself now that you have a better understanding as to what is needed. Try sending newsletters to your customers by email rather than by mail. You can also send coupons to your customers through an email rather than in the mail. Both of these will help to lower your bills for paper and ink, as well as postage.

Information technology:
Many of business spend a lot of money to have their computers systems worked on by a professional, but this can actually be a waste of money. By learning some basics about computers you can lower your bill from computer technicians. Some things that you can do on your own are to install virus protection software, make sure your computers are upgraded (Windows provides automatic updates), and learn how to use system restore and back ups in case of an emergency. By learning how to do the simpler things you are not going to have to call a computer technician every time your system has problems, you will only have to call them when you can not fix it.

Inventory:
This is an area where more money is lost than any where else in the company. If you do not have a good idea of how inventory works you can end up losing a lot of money. To help save money here you will need to keep track of your inventory that is purchased by using the correct type of inventory method. Also watch how much inventory you are buying at a time, you do not want to have too much on hand because that will lower your profits, but you also want to have enough on hand to meet your customers demands. If you are unsure of how to lower your inventory costs you can hire a consultant to offer you advice on how to lower inventory costs.