During good economic times, profit erosion is often caused by unplanned increases in spending. During slow times, making a reactionary cut can hurt your quality. It takes discipline to keep a business’s costs down, which includes tracking your sales and expenses regularly and establishing an annual budget. It is possible to keep track of your expenses and create a budget that will keep you on track.

Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels

Categorize Your Expenditures

Line by line reviewing your budget is tedious and time-consuming, and it does not always reveal worrying trends that can be used to spot larger spending problems. You can find opportunities to reduce costs by putting similar expenses into categories. Make your expenses into production and overhead categories, putting production expenses under production and overhead expenses under overhead. Make labor a category in each of these categories. You will be able to better understand your spending patterns when you use these four categories.

 

Overhead Expenses

Rent, phones, advertising, cleaning, and other overhead expenses are examples of overhead. Expenses for these items arise even when you aren’t producing your products or services. You should break these costs down by department, asking marketing, sales, administration, human resources, and IT managers for individual budgets. Identify areas where you can reduce costs without sacrificing quality. You might want to consult with your insurance company to find out what your coverages and deductibles are, so you can see if you can save money. You can reduce your monthly bill by increasing energy efficiency with your utility provider. Obtain the lowest possible option with every new service contract. Monitor your marketing budget to determine the ROI of each communication.

 

Indirect Costs Of Production

Consider the cost of making your product and determine if you are getting the best quality for the materials and supplies you purchase and if you are getting the best prices. You may be able to reduce your interest payments and stretch your payment terms if you ask for better credit terms from suppliers. If you can produce inventory just-in-time or if you can stockpile inventory, determine if you can reduce your production time or improve the efficiency of your facility. You need to think about the costs of every from red diesel price per litre to your waste disposal processes. 

 

Overhead Labor

Growing companies incur higher costs for office staff, especially if they receive annual raises that outpace market value. For new employees, consider telecommuting if you can get the same quality of work and productivity while reducing your office expenses, pay, and benefits. Analyze the cost of contract work versus the cost of employees for each function you have, and change from one to the other if your analysis uncovers any functions that cost too much. Employers should consider offering voluntary benefits instead of raises, allowing employees to buy low-cost insurance policies. 

 

Labor, Production

In order to reduce your production costs, you need to forecast demand, manage inventory, and schedule labor. Plan out your busy periods and slow periods with your sales team. In addition to raising labor costs by carrying inventory, reducing labor costs by producing more inventory might more than makeup for this by decreasing overtime, extra shift, or contract labor costs. Reduce debt service on material and supply purchases by making inventory just before you need it when labor cost is not a concern.

 

This short guide should help you to keep your cost down in your business organization. Do you have others that could be included in the comments section below? 

P.S. This post contains affiliate links.