In my experience, working remotely is more of an option than a necessity. There is value in working out of the office, but some remote tools can help save you time and money when you're looking to streamline the process.
This article will walk you through what it costs to run your business from home and which remote tools make the most sense.
The cost of running a remote work setup
Remote work is nothing new. Formerly, telecommuting was a luxury that many couldn't afford. However, with the rise of remote work, the cost of running a remote setup has come down to the point where many small businesses choose to run their entire operation from home.
However, the recent COVID-19 pandemic made remote work a byword and forced many businesses to adapt quickly. If you are willing to invest in a remote work setup, you can start saving time and money.
The cost of owning a home office
After working remotely for a while, you realize how high the cost is.
Many of you work from home or have done so for some time. How much do you invest in remote software or services?
My experience has been that it is usually about $500/month to run a small business. It depends on your tools and how you manage your remote setup.
I've been doing remote work for years, and in this article, I will walk you through the tools that I use to run a small content writing business; what they are for (or why I subscribed to them), and how much they cost. Best of all, I will give you a tool, a recent discovery that helped me save more money and become more efficient in managing my team and my work.
Let's start with Trello.
Trello is a well-known, user-friendly, and intuitive collaboration tool that allows you to organize projects and everything associated with them into boards. Trello, for example, will enable you to see what projects are being worked on, who is working on what, and how far the project has progressed. Trello is free to try, but with certain limitations. If you have under 100 team members, Trello's $10 per member per month is highly recommended.
Slack
The Slack website says it is "one place for messages, tools, and files." So, Slack has changed from just a simple messaging app to something more. You don't need any add-ons to use Slack since its primary purpose is to let you talk to other people. Users can speak to each other on Slack through channels, private messages, or DMs (person-to-person chat).
If there is one complaint about Slack, it's the price. It is expensive. Like Trello, Slack is free to try, but with certain limitations. Their next plan is called Pro, at $6.67 per active user per month when paid yearly but billed at $8 if you are paying monthly.
Zoom
My team and I use Zoom, another collaboration tool. It's a video conferencing tool. It has a chat-like interface, and you can even share screens with other team members.
Zoom is free to try, but you need to upgrade to Zoom for Business to have more than five people in a meeting. Zoom's first tier is $14.99 per month. It allows you to create personal meeting IDs for repetitive Zoom meetings and meeting recordings in the cloud or on your device. Still, it has a limit of 30 hours for group meetings. Zoom's first-tier allows for hosting virtual meetings with up to 100 attendees.
Dropbox
Dropbox is a cloud storage service that lets you save files online and sync them to your devices. You can use Dropbox links to share files and folders with other people without sending large attachments. The company offers a free plan with 2 GB of storage. You can pay $10 per month to increase storage to 2TB or upgrade to Business Advanced for Larger Teams for $20 per user per month (with bonus features such as fast full-text search and an extended 120-day file history with versioning).
Notion
Notion is a workspace that allows you to write, plan, collaborate with others, and organize everything in a single location. With this software, you can take notes, add tasks, manage projects, and do more. Notion is ultra-flexible software that can be used for work or personal life. I've heard of people who use it for writing a book, thesis, wedding plans, tracking meeting notes, etc. Notion is free to try, but you will pay $8 per member per month for teams and businesses.
Our Remote Work Team
There is a reason I mentioned the above tools. Since the pandemic, we have been forced to work remotely. Although we can return to work now, the benefits of working remotely still exist.
We are a team of 10 writers, and here is an example of our remote work software expenses for the past two years:
As shown in the table above, we are spending over $4000 annually on various remote and collaboration software, and I hear we are not alone. Our overhead was high with an expense like this, thus thinning our profit potential. I have heard of teams that pay $10,000 (and more) per month for their remote work software alone.
To save money, my teammates and I looked for a cloud-based, all-in-one solution that would allow us to work efficiently as a team at a more affordable price. That's when we learned about Edworking.
What is Edworking
Edworking is an online collaboration software that combines the power of Trello, Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, and Notion into an all-in-one, easy-to-use platform. Other services become superfluous simply because Edworking is the only trustworthy platform dedicated to remote workers.
With Edworking, you have a project management tool and a collaboration tool; you can organize and facilitate projects and save, share, and download files. You can chat or video conference with your team without limits inside the software.
Edworking is free to try forever, but it has limitations. Edworking has a premium plan that only costs £10, or $12.40 per member per month. It comes with unlimited tasks, unlimited storage, and unlimited video calls. It's available on iOS and Android.
With ten members in the team, this is what our premium expenses looked like when we switched to Edworking:
This means that my team and I could save a little more than 3,000 dollars.
With these savings, we have the freedom to focus on our projects without the stress of having to worry about our team's remote work operating expenses constantly.
The convenience of an all-in-one remote work platform
Edworking allows us to work as a team remotely. We can communicate with each other in real-time. We can work together on the same documents, share files, and collaborate on projects. If we are done collaborating using Edworking's workspace, we can turn our shared ideas into a blog.
Edworking allows us to do this without relying on third-party services such as Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, and Trello. With Edworking, we can collaborate on our projects, share files, and get organized in one place.
I was thinking about the number of hours we wasted just switching between these services while working, and that's why my team and I are so happy to have Edworking.
I hope this guide has helped you understand the advantages of Edworking and how it can help your team. If you want to try this fantastic and cost-efficient all-in-one remote work software, you can do so for free; visit Edworking today!
