BillShrink Offers You Recommendations On How To Minimize Your Budget Spending

In the current state of the economy, one of the hard things for businesses and entrepreneurs to do is minimize their expenses and avoid any unnecessary payments to help protect their profit margins, even if it’s quite minimal. Well it seems that there’s a startup that offers us some recommendations on how to be smart about our finances: BillShrink.com.

According to BillShrink, this is the concept behind the service:

The concept behind the company was born when co-founder Schwark and his wife tried to compare rates when changing their family cell phone plan. Overloaded with data on coverage, features and pricing, Schwark (who conveniently is a data analysis wizard) realized that this was a problem best solved by technology. Two years and many fancy algorithms later, BillShrink saves the average user $1500 and continually provides money-saving recommendations through timely email alerts to keep people saving even more.

So how does BillShrink help to save you and your business money? Simple…just input the information you want in this freemium service to find out how to save on choosing the correct credit cards, cell phone plans, gas stations and bank accounts. Obviously the one question is just how does BillShrink monetize itself? While they do provide a free service, BillShrink makes a share of the profit by encouraging you to switch services (as long as you save money, it seems). But it does appear apparent that you do not pay, but the credit card, business, bank, gas station, etc that you are switching to will compensate the company. They’ve done such a remarkable job that in 2009, over $1 billion was saved through everyday efforts.

To get started using the site, just go to their homepage and select what you want to begin saving. In order to properly assess what you could be saving, BillShrink prompts you to answer a few simple questions for each thing you’d like to save. By default it’s for wireless services. In this case, just enter the current amount you’re paying and then how many phone lines you might need. After you complete all the prerequisite questions, BillShrink will throw back some plans or information that you can explore along with the expected savings you’ll receive by switching to that account. Taking the phone example, in the screenshot above, I queried what I would save by choosing a different phone plan that was comparable to the one I currently have with Verizon. In the top left you’ll see my criteria for my current plan and by processing that, BillShrink knows that I could get a better deal by switching to T-Mobile. Even better, at the top of the page, it’ll show me the average savings that I could expect across all the carriers. So if I didn’t want to use AT&T, for example, I’ll know what my savings would be with a competitor, making my decision much easier.

Without going into much further detail, when you choose between the other available options like credit card, bank account or gas station, these are the similar results you can expect to get – obviously with different questions to help get you customized answers.

But what does this have to do with more complex businesses? There’s nothing different…since BillShrink will help businesses manage their expenses and budgets in pretty much the same way. Instead of gas stations, businesses can expect to look for customized responses to business account, wireless services and business card expenses. For those companies starting out and wanting to do a comparison and cut down on the time in choosing the right account, BillShrink has the answers that they need. Especially for startups that are often trying to avoid any unnecessary expenses or overhead – or just willing to maximize their bang for the buck, this service provides a pretty good comparison of products that most businesses might need.

Now if only they could also compare car insurance for me…

For more information about BillShrink, visit their website or read their Frequently Asked Questions here.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized, UnintentionalEntrepreneur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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