Setting up your digital office can be expensive. Many new businesses fall into the trap of thinking they have to setup a complete office environment to appear legitimate to their clients. One of the major startup expenses is the office phone system. Setting up a business line from the local telephone company can cost upwards of a $100 or more with taxes and fees as well as installation costs lumped on, and that’s just for a single line. Setting up a multiple extension phone system with voicemail and fax capabilities is an entirely different investment and can end up being several hundreds of dollars in phone equipment and extension routing software.

It’s important to spend your often limited resources on useful technology and functional things that actually serve a useful purpose to your startup business. That’s where voice-over IP (VOIP) or internet based telephone systems come in. At Durrani, technology is our business, so we are always looking for ways to implement new technologies that help our business run more efficiently.

We examined several services and decided upon RingCentral.com.With RingCentral.com our basic monthly subscription gives us up to 5 configurable extensions, a unified voice and fax line, voicemail on each extension, an automated attendant (a virtual operator that greets callers and allows them to select an extension or leave voice messages) and the ability to forward incoming calls to several other numbers, such as a cell phone, in sequential order or simultaneously. The service also includes a PC application that resides on your desktop so you can answer calls (with a headset) and monitor voicemail and fax messages. Each person with an extension can completely configure their own services down to the hours they want their phone to ring and how many rings it should ring for. Take for example my extension #101. I have it setup to ring on my office desktop first, then rollover to my cell phone. If I don’t pick up the call on either my desktop or cell phone, it rolls over to my RingCentral.com voicemail. I then get an email and optional text message notifying me of the new voicemail.

The system also automatically detects incoming faxes and converts them to your choice of document format, such as a PDF, TIFF, or JPG. And the fax gets emailed to your email account. You can also setup your desktop computer to automatically send any incoming faxes directly to an office printer. Faxes can also be directly sent to an individual extension number.

Any optional toll free numbers associated to your account are completely integrated to your system. Inbound calls can be routed to any extension or office phone. We have several 800 numbers (which only run about $5 per line per month) and we have them routed to separate office phones with unique voicemail systems to take messages and deliver them to designated staff.

RingCentral.com lets you manage your office and client communications virtually from everywhere. Not only is it significantly less expensive then traditional phone systems, it’s smarter and more convenient. All for less then $50 a month.

There are many other features we won’t get into here, but you can get your own free 30 day trial by clicking the banner below. Once you try RingCentral.com you won’t look back.