There are now more options to help you enhance your productivity and effeciency through communications while preserving working capital for the businesses you love.
Lease Programs
Many equipment manufacturers, such as a Avaya and Allworx have a relationship with a bank that provides competitive lease rates. Some even have their own financial services divisions that provide financing for end user equipment.
Avaya is currently offering competitive lease rates for 36 and 60 month terms that allow you to not only finance the hardware purchase over time, but the soft costs such as installation and annual maintenance as well. This is beneficial when you want to flat rate your communications technology investment and maintain a budget without surprises. Avaya also provides customers with the option of a fair market value lease with an end of lease buyout OR a finance lease that allows customers to spread out their payments over three or five years and own the system at the end of the lease. There are more flexible terms, including 13 and 24 months, with a $1.00 purchase option, if you would like to own your equipment sooner.
Allworx provides similar financing options through a bank partner. They are currently offering 36 and 60 month fair market value leases with competitive rates as low as 0%. Much like the Avaya terms, soft costs can be included in the total financed amount, which allows you include maintenance, software upgrade costs, etc. into one low and stable monthly payment. These innovative programs allow you to maximize your technology with minimal financial risk.
Hosted PBX
Another way for your business to get a feature-rich communications system at a fixed monthly rate is with a hosted PBX service. Aside from a minimal setup, installation or provisioning charge, most hosted PBX providers do not require an up front investment for the installation of these systems. The service provider retains ownership of all of the equipment on your site, which means you aren’t held responsible if something happens to it. If a phone dies, you call the service provider and they replace it with a working phone. This helps minimize support costs down the road and eliminates surprise repair charges. An added benefit of hosted services is that the monthly rate includes the hardware (telephones, etc), the voice service (telephone numbers, etc.) and the broadband to make it all work. In this scenario there really are no hidden costs. You will know exactly what your monthly communications bill will be for as long as you are a subscriber to this type of service.
Now more than ever it is important to streamline costs where possible. These solutions not only minimize (if not eliminate) up front capital expenditures for your telecommunications, they help reduce the total cost of ownership for your systems over time. As a small business owner, it’s hard to argue with that.
