This week we wanted to give you some pointers on how to make the most of your IT budget for this year.  We always recommend our clients speak with us about their IT budget and allow us to help advise them on what is required to be done this year and what they could look to do as improvements.  IT doesn’t have to be a scarey and large cost centre to your business.  We want to make your IT work for you and to do that we can help to demystify and help plan your IT spend.  Nobody likes something which is unpredictable or unknown, so let us help you to make it a known and quantifiable cost that allows you to plan and make better decisions for your IT infrastructure. Let’s dive in!

The first thing to consider is are there any major items in your IT infrastructure that will need replaced or be an additional requirement this year?  For example, servers, switches, routers, networking hardware or software upgrades etc.  Then, consider the recurring IT costs you might have for support, software etc.  Once you have accounted for these costs and set these funds aside you will now be able to see what funds you have available for improvements.

Once you have worked out your available funds for improvements, you can now make decisions easier on any requests you get from staff for new PCs, laptops and other devices.  When you know what is available to be spent on improvements and additional kit, the question of if you can afford it in your budget is already answered, leaving you to weigh up the business benefits to the new device.  If you don’t have any requests from staff for new devices a great place to start is to look at the age of all your devices and plan in to replace the older devices over the course of this year with the remaining IT budget.

If you roll this approach out to your IT plan each year and schedule replacing your older equipment, you will start to see less and less “failures” of PCs which bring unexpected costs and expenditure, and is unpredictable by the nature of failure.  Where you will end up is in a position with planned, predictable and expected IT costs.  If you’d like to discuss your IT budget the team here at MJD would be more than happy to help you plan your IT requirements for the coming year.