Running a business can be expensive. You have building costs, inventory costs, employee costs, utility costs, communication costs, and even licensing costs.
Licensing costs?
Whether you realize it or not, your business has licensing costs that can’t be avoided. In fact, without these licenses, your business would shudder in comparison to the competition.
What licenses are you talking about?
- Building permits?
- State licenses?
- Other regulatory licenses?
Nope, the licenses we are talking about help your business to run. Today, we are going to discuss three licensing expenses that you can avoid at your business. If you tried, you would end up crippling your business.
Ready to see what we’re talking about?
Operating Systems
If you are using an Apple or Windows computer system, you have a license key that gives you access to their operating system. While the license may not be recurring, it still costs you on a per-purchase basis.
As you’ve seen already, Apple and Microsoft are moving away from one-time, per-purchase licenses in favor of subscription models. While it has been a slow process, this is something that will eventually happen. As such, using one of these operating systems will be a licensing expense that you can’t avoid – just like you can’t already (not legally anyways).
Office Suites
Now, I can already hear you saying “but there are free office suites available right now!” While there are free alternatives, can you honestly say that they hold up to Microsoft Office/Office 365? Most businesses use Microsoft’s Office 365 or Google’s G Suite to handle their business needs such as word processing and spreadsheet generation. While G Suite can handle these needs, they still are not as robust at Microsoft Office/Office 365.
For most businesses, G Suite and Office 365 are the ONLY two options. But, each of these come with a per-user licensing cost. And again, this is a licensing expense that you can’t avoid. Sure, you could try to make it using LibreOffice, but why would you want to make your employees work harder (and more hours) on a project that could be completed in half the time or less using the right office suite to begin with?
Customer Relationship Management Systems
This may appear to be an optional licensing subscription, but if you communicate with your customers on a regular basis, this is not optional. We can’t think of any business that would not benefit from a CRM system.
These systems help to manage all of your customer data, track communication attempts and discussions, stay up-to-date on all of their contact information, and provide deep analysis of their buying behaviors and more. Again, this is a licensing expense that you can’t avoid.
Wrap Up
Most businesses chalk these licensing costs up to “the cost of running business”. However, if you aren’t keeping up with the per-purchase costs and/or per-user costs, you could be racking up a bill that isn’t worth it. In most cases, one way to save a little on licensing costs is to switch from Office 365 to G Suite. If you are already using an accounting platform, a solid CRM system, it would be easy to make the switch to G Suite. If you aren’t, then this is a good time to reconsider your software and licensing needs.