Keeping Costs Down

Hello,

As the business support officer one of my responsibilities is to keep an eye on our office and administration spending and keep it as low as possible. All charities have to watch their budgets and often achieve surprisingly low running costs, by necessity rather than choice.

This has become even more important in the current economic climate. Many organisations have had significant budget cuts, yet energy and heating bills have risen, along with demand for our services. Moreover, with historically low interest rates, charities are finding it harder to get a good return on their savings and grant making bodies are finding that their trust funds and assets, which they use to make awards, are worth less.

So what can charities do to reduce their costs?

• Keep an eye on your utility bills. Don’t be afraid of switching supplier or seeing if there’s a better deal with your current one. You can contact Utility Aid to help you source the cheapest deal www.utility-aid.co.uk.
• As gas and electricity prices rise, think about installing double glazing, insulation, secondary double glazing or even just picking some draft excluders from a local hardware store.
• Your organisation may be eligible to join your Local Authority’s stationery scheme, if it has one. The City of Edinburgh Council, for example, allows some charities to join its reduced procurement scheme with Office Depot.
• There are several IT suppliers that provide low cost products to the charity sector. These include UK IT recycling (www.ukitrecycling.com/charity ), Computers for Charities (www.computersforcharities.org), IT For Charities (www.itforcharities.co.uk/pcs.htm) and Charity Technology Exchange (www.communityni.org/charity-technology-exchange-ctx#.UhtJ0NK-pRQ). Gumtree can also provide exceptional bargains if you know exactly what you’re looking for.
• Similarly, In Kind Direct provides charities with low cost surplus goods such as work wear, household and cleaning goods, children’s arts and crafts supplier and stationery. Check out their website at www.inkinddirect.org
• Many charities rely on the interest from savings accounts to help their finances. It’s therefore worthwhile to see if other banks can offer better rates. Like utility companies, banks can be complacent about their customers and tend to assume that the hassle of switching is simply too much for most people. A reliable comparison site is www.which.co.uk/.
• Go through your old customer invoices to see who in the past paid for what. You can get in touch with old customers cheaply through email or by writing a formal letter re-introducing yourselves and your services. If you have sold training, dvds, hard copy resources or consultancy work, get back in touch with your clients.
• If things are tight, go through your latest accounts with your board and check your spending. Does anything leap out? Travel and subsistence? Rent or equipment hire? Insurance premiums? It can be a good idea to check what you outsource, such as HR, payroll, IT support or office cleaning. Other firms and services will be eager to provide free quotations, and even the very act of checking how long your existing contracts have to run can motivate a supplier to lower their rate. We don’t tend to do this in Scotland in case we’re seen as pushy and rude but we should remind ourselves that our commitment is to our service users, not to our accountants or water suppliers!
• We often don’t think about this because it’s all around us – our premises. Do you rent, pay a mortgage or own your office outright? If you rent, you may find that you are tied in to certain office services such as a receptionist, cleaner, car parking facilities or lift maintenance. These can be optional or open to negotiation. If you pay a mortgage or own the property outright, you could think about renting out some of the space. Increasingly it is common to rent out a single desk to a small social enterprise, consultant or a researcher. You may have space which other organisations could use for meetings or training.