Managing a budget is difficult, let alone budgeting for something as complicated as your IT infrastructure. Even though IT is notoriously difficult to budget for, it still continues to grow as a priority for organizations. How can you ensure that your budget can keep up with the projected expenses of your IT in the next several years?
Reconsider Your Business Practices
Investing in technology is one of the best ways you can improve your company’s operations. If you strategically implement technology, you stand to gain quite a bit of ground from an operations perspective. With this in mind, you can think about your IT budget as a growth mechanism—one that enables progress rather than something that limits your other types of spending. If you look at it as something that places a cap on your other expenses, it will only hold your organization back. Instead, use it as something that allows for possibility.
Understand the Role of Your Budget
You have budgets for other parts of your organization, and just like those, your IT budget is going to involve allocating funds to assist your technology infrastructure. This might involve recurring costs or up-front costs associated with hardware, software, licensing, and subscription services. While your IT budget will generally have the same items on it day in and day out, you can also consider it a wishlist of sorts, where you plan for future expenses related to IT.
Consider These Key Components of Your IT Budget
Your IT budget will consist of the following two expenses:
- Ongoing IT Expenses – Expenditures for daily IT operations, including hardware maintenance, software licensing, and staffing costs for internal or outsourced IT support.
- Project Expenses – Additional costs incurred during specific projects, such as outsourced consulting, administrative expenses for infrastructure enhancements, or procurement of specialized software and hardware.
Sometimes organizations might include IT and its related costs into their various departmental budgets through chargebacks (itemized expenses), but we recommend that you only use this complex process if you have to.
Your IT Budget is a Significant Investment
If you want to make full use of your IT, you have to integrate budgeting into the overall financial plan for your business. Specifically, your IT budget allows you to allocate precise capital funds for initiatives. You can make this more effective by investing in task automation and efficiency whenever possible. The more businesses choose to implement technological advancements and make the transition from outdated systems to better processes, IT will create a shift in culture that will see larger expenses yield more serious operational costs than ever before.
Your IT budget also serves to improve operations through the use of budget-friendly services like the cloud, managed IT, and cybersecurity solutions, all of which are made more affordable and flexible thanks to relatively recent innovations.
If you would like some assistance with your IT budget, North Central Technologies can provide the support you need to be successful. Learn more by calling us today at 978-798-6805.
