How to Reduce Operational Cost of your Business in the UAE

It does not come as a surprise that the operational costs of businesses in the UAE are high. This is due to the annual payment of license fees, rent and a number of other expenses. You will not find any clear guidance, as to how to minimize the said costs, however, we would like to share with you certain approaches that you can adopt to cut down your operational costs.

First of all, let’s refresh what we mentioned multiple times before. If you plan to register in a free zone, you shall not forget that there are different registration packages offered. Each package comes with a certain visa quota and the cost of registration may go up with the increase in the number of visas required. Very often entrepreneurs disregard the fact that you can opt for a package with one visa quota only from the start and upgrade the package as soon as the need arises. Therefore, the tip no. 1 would be to opt for the most cost-effective package from the start and save on the fees, that you could have paid for extra visa quota that you would not use in the first year or so.

If you, however, need to rent a standard office, as you want to hire staff, who needs a working space, you still have options. As you are aware by now, you may decide to opt for a serviced office in the first year. The advantage would be fully serviced space with no need for extra payments in connection with utilities, internet, cleaning services and sometimes even local phone calls. You also do not need to hire a secretary or assistant. There are a lot of serviced offices in the UAE and the competition among those is very high. Therefore, you will definitely be able to find a good deal and it would be cheaper, then to rent a stand alone office, pay security deposits to the landlord, service providers and pay your monthly bills. Additionally, you will be able to pay your office rent with 12 installments as compared to 1, 2,3 or 4, when renting directly from the landlord. As such, you can further cut down costs by choosing the right office solution.

To bring the operational costs even further down you may look for promotions with respect to annual license renewal. Sometimes certain free zone authorities, for example, offer to pay for the renewal of company’s registration for two or three years in advance for a slightly smaller fee. Again, this will help you to save a fraction of your funds.

If it is only you running a company at the beginning, it also means that you might need to minimize your expenses on bookkeeping, auditing and other services of third parties. Let’s start with the bookkeeping and auditing. As you may have already discovered, bookkeeping and auditing is a very niche market in the UAE, the reason being that all businesses in the country require these services. As a result, as soon as you start searching for a suitable service provider, you will discover that the price range varies greatly from one professional service company to another one. Our recommendation would be to conduct a thorough research and contact several firms, requesting for a quote. While auditors you need once a year, bookkeeping services would be required on a regular basis. The more often the bookkeeper needs to come to your office and the larger the amount of transactions he needs to record is, the higher would be the remuneration of the service provider. As such, if the amount of transactions is relatively low, you could agree with the bookkeeper that he would be visiting you once every three months and you will pay a lower fixed fee for the service provided. A full time bookkeeper you will need only then, when your company grows and you see that you need someone full time to keep all financial records in order. In the meantime, you can just resort to the help of a freelancer, another one-man company, who would be able to provide a bookkeeping service at a very competitive price, which can often be well below the market rate. The same approach can apply, when dealing with other service providers, when you want to develop a web-site for your company or to take care of the SMM strategy. The tip is to opt for services of freelancers, who are registered and are allowed to offer their assistance against remuneration. Start-ups can always offer you a better rate. As such, just pick your service providers wisely, give the preference to freelancers, and you will again save a considerable amount of money.

Finally, if you have been working in the UAE before, you must know that the recruitment process in the country is a quite costly one for the employer. It involves payment of visa fees, guarantee deposits, medical insurance for the whole year, medical test fees and more. Not all start-ups have sufficient funds to onboard even two or three people at the same time. Some of the entrepreneurs understood the need for more affordable hiring very well and this resulted into creation of a number of platforms, which are linking students, who want to intern with companies in order to gain experience, and companies, looking for extra helping hands. Now it became possible to engage university graduates and those, who are still in the process of obtaining their degrees, for a certain period of time to assist with administrative matters or other work routine. As such, if you need some help in the company but you are not well established yet to recruit someone full time, you may consider the internship option, as it is a win-win situation for the employer and the intern.

Although the approaches we have just enumerated are very common, still entrepreneurs oftentimes forget to use the said techniques to bring operational costs down. We hope you made a note of everything we just discussed and you will definitely make use of the strategies we suggested in this chapter.

If you want to know more about Dubai freezone company formation, feel free to get in touch with our professional consultant team and we would be delighted to assist you and help you to compare Dubai freezone company setup costs and help you to find that free zone, which would suit your business needs the most.

Disclaimer: Business Boutique UAE-Consultants.com is not affiliated with any particular government or legal entity. Business Boutique does not give professional legal advice nor any other professional advice subject to a public office in the government. This article merely sets out a simple and basic idea as to the reasons of Dubai freezone company setup and Dubai free zone company formation cost. Business Boutique in no way holds nor imposes any official governmental or legal authority and the article herein is only to be taken as a guide. All further governmental or legal issues should be addressed to the corresponding authorities.

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