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bordercars

Need some advice, we work from home and have a landline for the business, taxi service so the phone rings quite a bit, we also have a home landline last quarter calls came to £6.62 ( should really of used taxi phone ) but the bill with the line rental is £49.52, it's handy sometimes to have 2 line because we can keep business from personal and if the other driver has it on divert to him we cannot get any incoming calls. even on divert we can still call out and we have 2 cell phones in the house so i suppose people could call these even if it meant us calling them back. do we cancel the residential line or is there some other way of keeping the line but reducing the rental. any suggestions welcome. thanks

pricefighter

The cheapest price you can get the BT Residential Landline down to is Opt 1.Which is £33 a quarter. Do you have any add ons on it you dont use eg call divert.Are you paying for caller display which is now free.

tipsychick

I work from home too and like you, have a home phone line and a business phone line. My accountant was absolutely adamant that I have the two lines. Apparently, if you get investigated by the Inland Revenue, things can get very tricky if you've only got the one line. I certainly wouldn't want to end up not being able to set my business calls off against tax if there was a problem with the Revenue.

Like you, I rarely use the home line and my broadband is also on the business line!

If you're with BT, there is a light user package that you could use for the home line which makes the calls a bit cheaper. Alternatively, I'm going to switch to the Post Office offer (£50.00 towards calls/line rental over a six month-ish period) and if you go through Quidco, I think you get an extra £30.00 odd cash back.

Have a look at Martin's article about saving money on phone bills as it applies to your business line as well as home line. I've just set up an account with Primus for free evening and weekend calls and am using 1899 for cheaper daytime calls. I think it should bring down my business phone bill by a fortune each quarter!

pricefighter

You can use 1899 on a BT Business Line,but you cannot Use Primus Saver 2 this is for residential customers only.

Euphony who Martin mentions in his article do a product for small business customers see http://www.euphony.co.uk/euBiz1.htm. This might suit you and it can be used in conjunction with 1899 and a BT Business Line. (I must point out i am not a Euphony Consultant).

tipsychick

Not sure what type of BT lines you have bordercars but I have two residential BT lines - one is my "home" phone and the other my "business" phone. Hope that satisfies my accountant's criteria!

Thanks pricefighter, I hadn't realized that Primus was only for a BT residential line (not that it should affect me).

Haven't telephones got incredibly complicated in recent years, along with everything else? I seem to spend most of my time shaving off another few pence here and there and never seem to feel any richer!

redux

More complicated still - you could consider using VoIP over your broadband connection and saving one line rental.

That would present a dilemma though, as some VoIP providers have plenty of useful options, pbx, call forwarding etc - but you'd be dubious about changing the business phone number.

pricefighter

BT Business Single Line Customers pay £41.15p a quarter for their line rental but get more for their money then residential customers see : http://www.bt.com/store/product/detail.jsp?oid=229165&subcatN=Phone%2B%26%2Bdigital%2Blines&subcat=-33454&tab=Phone%2Blines%2B%26%2Bcall%2Bservices&parentcatN=Phone%2Blines%2B%26%2Bcall%2Bservices&obsOID=229165&obsType=PRODUCT&obsPage=%2Fstore%2Fproduct%2Fcatalog.jsp&vStore=1030&cookieFlag=Yes&UserSegment=SME

tipsychick

Thanks for the link pricefighter. It's probably a bit more than I need for my business but I do like the sound of a local/national rate call being capped at 10p for an hour! I've found that using 1899 with its 3p connection fee has made me a lot less free and easy with the phone during the day!

pricefighter

tipsychick wrote:

Thanks for the link pricefighter. It's probably a bit more than I need for my business but I do like the sound of a local/national rate call being capped at 10p for an hour! I've found that using 1899 with its 3p connection fee has made me a lot less free and easy with the phone during the day!

But doesnt 1899 cap the price of a 01/02 geographical call to 3p for as long as you like.

tipsychick

Yes it does but knowing I'll definitely be paying 3p for it no matter what, makes me think twice about whether I actually need to make the call at all. I'm certainly gossiping a lot less and waiting for friends/family to call me first!

Heinz

tipsychick wrote:

Yes it does but knowing I'll definitely be paying 3p for it no matter what, makes me think twice about whether I actually need to make the call at all. I'm certainly gossiping a lot less and waiting for friends/family to call me first!

:question:

But, using BT, you'd pay at least 5p (their minimum call charge).