I offer a non-traditional but very low-cost and very functional business phone solution.

If you're looking for a business phone for your home office you might be looking for some sort of standard traditional "phone" like maybe one of these type:

These are generally your standard home office phones. They range in price from inexpensive to quite expensive indeed, and of course have a range of features. If you don't have a "POTS" line (Plain Old Telephone Line) you'll need some VOIP appliance, something like Obihai, OOma, Cisco, Grandstream etc. etc. More expense, both to buy it and their annual cost to run. Then you have to set it up and configure it. VOIP means "Voice over IP" meaning that your voice signal is broken down and sent as data over the internet. In the first iteration of my home office I had one powered by an ObiTalk box. It worked fine but eventually it stopped wortking with Google Voice, which was the service that I used.

Setting up my home office again, I started considering my options...my phone and the VOIP box were dead, so I had to start from ground zero to re-establishing a work phone - or did I?

A BUSINESS PHONE - LOOK AGAIN!

I had an old cell phone, a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 with a storied history. It didn't have a SIM card but couldn't I use it just to make calls over WiFi? I fiddled with an app called TextNow which allowed for you to make and receive phone calls and texts over WiFi only, completely free. But with free there's always a catch. There were ads. You had to make or receive a call within a certain number of days or you'd lose the number and have to get a new one. You could buy a SIM card and then you could take it anywhere and lock the number in, but it's a home business phone, I don't plan on taking it anywhere. And now if I do that I have a monthly fee again.

Finally it dawned on me. My original business phone number was through Google voice. I had (not to my knowledge) let it lapse and when I checked it was still functionally. On the Galaxy Note 3 I downloaded the Google Voice app and logged in with my credentials. I did a little testing and Voila! I had a working phone! I could make and receive calls and texts with it with my business number with the phone connecting to my home WIFI. Even better, I could make and receive calls and texts with it for free within the United States (which is good, as I'm not anticipating a groundswell of international business). No SIM card in the phone! If you do this, just remember to place calls through the Google Voice app, not the normal phone call app. Via Google voice I could forward calls to a phone number, my regular cell phone, my home phone, wherever. Google would save my business calls in voicemail, transcribe them and email them to me. There are a ton of features making this a very powerful phone solution, up to the demands of any home business.*

Even better, it's a cell phone. You already have cables and chargers around for it. You can download a lot of familiar apps that will make your life easier and integrate with your business (calendar, contact list and way more). Now you have another powerful business tool. In my own case I love the Galaxy Note line of Samsung phones because they include a stylus and note-taking capability that I've grown to find irreplaceable. And for specifics, while the Galaxy Note 3 is fairly ancient by today's standards (came out in 2014 for god's sake!) it had pretty prescient specs for its day that still hold their own today: a 5.7 inch display, a quad core Snapdragon 800 processor with 3 GB's of RAM no less. It also had a built-in stylus AND the ability to pair with Samsung's new smart watch (the then current rage). The screen was a full 1920x1080 full HD super AMOLED screen with a pixel density of 386 ppi. Reviewers raved about the screen. The front camera is 13 megapixels! It has a USB 3 port! Decent ones currently sell on eBay for around $60 and I'm sure there are other brand cell phones equally inexpensive and equally good. By buying used you're keeping your costs down while re-using an electronic assembly that would wind up in a landfill.

I even found that back in the day I had bought a charging dock for it but never used it. Here's my "new" business phone:

Super capable, and for me free, I already had everything. Cost to operate over time: zero.

Consider something like this for your home office. You may even have one already lying in a drawer!

*Because I was making calls via Google voice and not through the normal phone app, the sensor that senses your face and blanks the screen was not operative. So your face would trigger various buttons and apps on your phone really messing up your phone calls. I got around this by downloading and installing from the Play store an open-source app called "Proximity Sensor." It works like a charm in blanking the screen while making calls.