by Debs Greasley

Created on: March 04, 2010   Last Updated: March 06, 2010

Is there such a thing as a free lunch?

The good news is that “YES”, there can be! Small business owners could always do with something for free.

When you run a small business, buying regular licensed software can be a costly exercise. For most of us, the high end complexity of most purchased software is simply a waste of time and money as we never really use the full functionality of the software anyway.

A couple of months back I spent about 2 weeks looking for a free piece of software that would allow me to log cash sales, produce simple invoices and perhaps give me a report for month end accounting. Up until then, I had been maintaining 2 different Excel spreadsheets to manage this and month end accounting was a small nightmare in terms of time. I found something eventually and I am still using it, so the time I spent looking was well spent. It also saves me a huge amount of angst! I also recommended this to another local business and they use it as well.

Free software is known as ‘Freeware’. There is generally no support or warranties for the software and the products can be downloaded from the internet. A free version of software sometimes has limited functionality or is a scaled-down version of a more powerful product which can be purchased.

Why is there free software, surely everyone wants to make money? Well, yes and no. There are two main reasons why free software is available.

One: some companies create software from a purely altruistic point of view in order to provide users with more choice or better service than just those products provided by the big name monopolies such as Microsoft and adobe. Good examples of this are the people who out together OpenOffice, CutePDF, Mozilla Firefox and ThunderBird. FNB Instant Accounting, created here in South Africa is a free service to it’s business customers. Two: many software creators want to showcase their product. They put together a scaled-down version or time based evaluation, which shows users how great the software is and potentially entices them to upgrade to the full, purchased version which has more functionality. Examples of this are Many Moon and AVG. This is also typically the kind that you get when you get a free CD with a magazine.

Is the software really free though? If you research and select the correct software download, yes it is. Be aware of the ones who offer you a ‘FREE DOWNLOAD’ - this normally means that there is a cost to the software, even

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