How to create an IT budget

As with any part of your business, keeping a handle on the expenditure of your IT department is crucial. But with an array of different costs to cover, and a sometimes confusing mix of one-off and on-going expenses, budgeting for your IT needs can be a challenge. Today we’re walking you through what to think about when you create an IT budget.

Work out last year’s IT spend

The easiest way to get started with IT budgeting is to work out what you spent on it last year. Write down all your IT expenses over the past 12 months and categorise them into recurring and one-off expenses. Your list will include items such as:

• Equipment
• Software, including licences and content management systems
• Domain names and hosting
• Servers and server support
• Cloud services, such as private cloud
• Cyber security
• IT monitoring and IT support

Budget for hardware replacements

Don’t forget that ‘one-off’ expenses aren’t always really one-offs. In particular, your equipment may need to be replaced if it’s a few years old, so at this point you should also take the time to take an inventory of your current equipment and see whether you’ll need to budget for new hardware this year. This inventory should include laptop and desktop computers, monitors, servers, routers and mobile devices.

Spot where savings can be made

Having compiled a list of all your likely expenses for the year, you can start to spot where savings can be made. Are you still paying a monthly fee for software you rarely use? Are you forking out for twice the amount of data storage you actually need? Are there opportunities for consolidating different services into one? At this stage, you might find it useful to have us conduct a free IT audit to make sure your IT infrastructure is still working efficiently for your business. This will also highlight weaknesses in your security, for which you’ll need to budget a solution.

Anticipate your IT needs for the year ahead

Budgeting is about looking ahead, so you’ll also need to think about what you’re going to need going forward. Will your ecommerce system need an upgrade to handle a projected growth in orders, for example? Will you need additional storage or bandwidth for a particular marketing campaign your comms team has planned? Review your whole business’s goals for the next year and try to spot where your IT department might be placed under strain.

Wrap your costs up into one

One way to keep your IT budget as simple as possible is to roll as many of your expenses as possible into one. At deeserve, we can help with that. Our fixed monthly cost covers everything you need, from hardware to software licences, 24/7 IT support and proactive monitoring. Not only does that simplify your budgeting, but you have the potential to save money, too: for high compute and storage requirements, for example, you’ll find our monthly cost is frequently significantly lower than public cloud services such as AWS and Azure.

If you’d like to enlist our help with optimising your IT infrastructure and simplifying your IT budget, give us a call on 01509 80 85 86 or email us at [email protected].

Posted on: 6th September 2021.