The tone, culture and atmosphere of your business or company starts at the top with YOU, the business owner.

More and more products and services are moving towards subscription-based models. For businesses, it’s important to carefully track and periodically review all your subscription-based products and services to ensure those subscriptions align with your current business needs. There’s no reason to throw money into a black hole!

When purchasing user-replaceable parts, components and consumables for business equipment, it’s ideal to use genuine parts from the manufacturer especially when the equipment is still under warranty and if genuine parts are available.

Leasing computer equipment may be an option if you need to purchase a significant amount of computer equipment but don’t want to invest the funds and incur the costs upfront.

When purchasing computer equipment for your business, there are some decisions to make like desktop vs laptop or Mac vs Windows PC. However, when it comes to cost, you don’t want to buy the least expensive (aka cheapest) computer available nor do you necessarily need to buy the most expensive computer available.

If you have compatible/supported non-live production workstations which you can use to test and evaluate major software updates/upgrades before deploying those updates/upgrades to live production workstations, this would be the ideal way to go.

Deploying critical updates, bug and security fixes/patches can be tricky as you need to weigh the benefits of immediately deploying these updates with the risks of potential incompatibility with existing software and hardware and the potential of these updates creating new or unexpected problems within your environment.

It’s important for software updates/upgrades to be properly tested and evaluated in non-production environments and on non-production workstations, to the extent possible, before being deployed company-wide on live production workstations and in a live production environment.

While you may feel inclined to update/upgrade software as soon as it’s released/available, you’ll want to exercise proper due care especially when updating/upgrading software on live production workstations for your business.

Still running an in-house PBX? It may be time to move/upgrade to a hosted or cloud-based VoIP solution.

If you currently use Intuit QuickBooks Desktop or Enterprise software to manage your business accounting and financial needs, you’re probably aware Intuit recently released the latest version of their QuickBooks Desktop and Enterprise software.

Regardless of whether you run QuickBooks locally, in a client/server environment or use QuickBooks with Hosting, you should perform your own routine backups of your QuickBooks company files.

Intuit QuickBooks is an extremely popular, easy to use and learn, flexible yet robust accounting and financial software solution for many businesses.

There are many accounting and financial software solutions available which may be suitable for your business. When choosing a solution, it’s important to select an accounting and financial software solution that contains the functionality and feature set which best aligns with your specific business needs.

While you may think running your small business’ finances using invoices generated in Word or Excel and tracking income and expenses through Excel spreadsheets will suffice, think again!

If you can’t physically access your office or business, can you and your team continue to work and operate your business normally or close to normally?

Businesses need to routinely invest in, upgrade and/or replace older, obsolete and unsupported technologies.

If you (the business owner) or your employees need to use a personal credit or charge card (or even cash) for legitimate business-related expenses, complete a business expense report with an itemized list of the transactions.