2025 is already shaping up to be an interesting year for business owners, with the very real prospect of international tariffs, fast-developing automation and much more.
Now is a good time to take a look at your business and find opportunities to save and cut costs, ensuring you have a highly efficient operation throughout the year.
However, in an increasingly competitive market, the quality of your product or service cannot suffer.
With that in mind, here are five saving opportunities that will have a minimal impact on day-to-day business operations but can save you significant sums of money.
Business utilities
When you see how many bill validation services there are for business utilities, you’ll quickly realise that there’s a good chance that your own business might be getting overcharged.
From electricity and gas to business water, there are a lot of suppliers who will tie customers into contracts with hidden fees and inconsistent meter reads.
This is especially true for business water, which is deregulated – but many suppliers are still tied in with wholesalers.
Have a look at your water bill, as well as other utility bills, check comparison sites, and see if it is possible to negotiate a better deal with your current supplier.
If you dedicate a day towards this, you’ll find that across all your utilities, you’ll be able to save on at least one – or possibly on all three.
Pricy software
The do-it-all HR software or email marketing tools at the tips of your fingers can make a lot of tasks easier.
However, in many cases, their cost does not justify the time or resources saved.
If manually submitted timeslips on a spreadsheet are working for your business, there is no need to upgrade to pricy software that does essentially the same thing.
And if you have in-house developer resources, you may also find that you can create proprietary software for your business, which does exactly what you need it to do, rather than having a tool that only just meets the brief.
Unused schemes
The Cycle To Work scheme is a great incentive to encourage employees to commute by bike.
However, if you have a relatively small operation that has a low turnover, and nobody cycles, it may be worth scrapping your membership to the scheme.
Similarly if you compensate for travel to the office, you may save by only having a single contact day.
Most businesses have remote working infrastructure in place from Covid lockdowns, so it should not incur any additional costs.
Dedicated freelancers
From content writing to design and web development, there are more highly-skilled freelancers out there than ever before.
It could be worth having freelancers rather than full time staff to help with marketing, social media and website management.
Often, skilled freelancers are booked out months in advance, so it’s worth seeking out the right individual at local networking events sooner rather than later.
If you find a freelancer who understands and does a good job with the work you are outsourcing, it’s worth paying them a retainer fee – meaning when work does not need to be done, they will cost a lot less than a staffer, but when they are needed they will be available.
Tax incentives
Missing out on available credits, deductions, or incentives is essentially leaving money on the table. It’s worth working with a tax advisor to identify and claim all eligible benefits.
There are lots of incentives that business owners may not realise they are applicable for.
For example, there is a Research and Development (R&D) tax relief, which allows companies to claim back a proportion of their expenditure on qualifying R&D activities.
A lot of businesses will wrongly assume R&D tax relief is only for tech or science-heavy sectors, but it applies across industries, including activities that improve existing products, services, or processes.
This can include adapting machinery to meet new regulations, updating recipes to reduce sugar content or creating sustainable packaging.
Good luck through 2025
It’s bound to be a busy year, so make sure that you have everything that you can control operating as efficiently as possible.
Hopefully, these five steps will help set you off into 2025 with a strong start!To keep on top of tips, trends, and news, be sure to subscribe to Mirror Review.
