All of the advice and information on this page is free! Even some excellent software that we recommend is free too!

If you have a basic grasp of computers and the Internet and have the time and patience, it should also be possible to use all of these tips and (for most home offices) do the work yourself. If you can't spare the time we can set up any of these ideas for you and you will still save money.

Call us on 0845 890 0913 for more infomation.

Dont get a new BT line for business use.

Using VOIP (Internet Telephony) you you can save on a BT line rental and save on calls.Voice Over Internet Protocol or VOIP is a way of making telehone calls over your broadband line. This means your home telephone will remain available for domestic calls, but simultaneously you can make and receive calls using a fraction of your broadband capacity. You can have an 0800, 0845 or even a geographic number (01708 in the havering area). Call quality is at least as good as a good mobile call and you can choose to either pay as you go on outbound calls only or (for around £10 a month) have unlimited incoming and outgoing calls, to any UK landline number. You will also save money on calls to mobiles and often on calls to international numbers. We estimate that the average home office can save between £20 and £60 a month using this system, more if you regularly call abroad. A voip phone can be bought for about £40 and some routers (see next section below) contain an adaptor that means you can use an ordinary telephone as your VOIP phone.

Here are some web links where you can read more.

http://www.voiptalk.org/products/index.html

http://signup.voip.demon.net/demon/products/voice/voiceoverbroadband/uk/

If you want us to help you set this up call us on 0845 890 0913 (our VOIP number) and we can arrange to visit to get you set up.

Don't get a second broadband line for business use.

A wireless or wired router can share your existing home broadband connection between many computers. You will barely notice that many computers are sharing the line and you will gain other advantages too. Files can be shared between computers, you even save because you won't need a printer to be connected to each computer, they can all share one printer! Wireless Routers cost about £50 and for three machines sharing the broadband connection, the adaptors will cost about £45 for all three. Having a router also makes your computers more secure as it has a built in hardware firewall to supplement the software one you most probably are relying on now.

If you dont already have broadband or would like to switch to another provider, why not try getting your broadband through us, we are a local company, have no call centres with robots manning them and promise never to be in Delhi!

Dont buy Microsoft office.

We at Natdata Limited use a product called open office exclusively. Its free software and can be downloaded from the Internet. The vast majority of the time you will experience no compatibility problems with other users who are using Microsoft office. You will be able to create, read and edit Microsoft word documents. Create, read and edit excell spreadsheets and the same with powerpoiunt presentations. If you are used to word and excell, don't worry, its so close in layout you mostly won't notice the difference, unless you are a very advanced user. By default it saves in its own format but you can change that using the save as function or even set it to permanently use the Microsoft format if you wish.

Take a look at www.openoffice.org

Dont Buy Microsoft Small Business Server.

This piece of advice is only really relevant for larger companies or small office/home office businesses that need to share data with remote workers. IN such situations most small business IT solution providers will recommend Microsoft Small Business Server. Depending on th eprovider and how many users you will need the prices for this will probably be in excess of £1200. Even if you set it up yourself it will most probably cost you in the region of £600. Using the Linux based SME Server you can set it up yourself for as little as £300, less if you have a reasonable old PC knocking about with at least 512 Meg Ram. Its much easier to set up than the Microsoft server, having been designed from the ground up for small business use rather than being added as an afterthought to a product for large organisations, which is basically what Microsoft have done with SBS server.

Even if you have us set this up for you it will still save you at least £400 over going the microsoft route.

Use SME Server instead from www.smeserver.org