Starting today you pay two cents more to mail a letter. It might not sound like much, but it’s another contributor to expense creep - the steady erosion of profits from lots of “little” cost increases.

For example, January of this year brought a four-cent increase in the allowable business mileage expense as well as minimum wage increases in several states throughout the country. No doubt your company’s health insurance premiums went up this year, too, and borrowing money is more expensive: the Prime Rate is now more than 100% higher than it was three years ago.

Taken together, these modest increases add up. That’s why I periodically blog about expense creep: you should never stop combing through your P&L, looking for ways to cut costs both large and small.

It’s easy to become complacent; I know from personal experience. I just found out we can save 10% by paying our offsite document storage vendor annually instead of monthly. I should have asked them up front when we signed up. Sure, it’s only $40 a year, but I’d rather have that $40 in profit than not at all.

And now that I’m “awake” to this issue, it got me thinking…if we go paperless and stopped storing all those boxes, how long before we recoup our investment?

Cost control…it’s a never-ending process.