He Who Controls IT Costs Controls the Entire Budget

Every business owner has to have an idea of how money is moving in and out of their company. This is why creating a budget is an essential part of sustaining a long-term business model. Undeniably, one of the biggest expenses any company has is payroll. Many small businesses struggle with this, especially when it comes to budgeting for your IT.

On one hand, by paying their employees too little, they will likely see a substantial amount of employee turnover. On the other, if you spend a large percentage of your company’s money on payroll, you risk hindering your profits and indirectly putting your business at risk.

Setting Up a Yearly Budget
Setting up a budget for your business is an essential step to avoid runaway costs. The variables that you need to consider include:

• Rent/Mortgage
• Insurance
• Procurement costs
• Payroll and requisite taxes
• Marketing and sales
• Utilities (electric, water, Internet, etc.)
• Estimated maintenance costs
• Legal & accounting fees
• Licenses & fees
• Office supplies
• Travel costs
• Interest & depreciation

Separating the wheat from the chaff may be difficult when there are many departments that could use the money that you have to distribute. By estimating what you are going to pay out, you can compare it to your projected gross earnings, and determine what kind of projects your organization can consider implementing over the next year. Since many of these costs are mandatory, concocting a thorough and conservative budget is in the best interest of every business owner.

Notice that list doesn’t include “technology”. That is because it spans several of the variables listed above. There is the expense of procuring new hardware and software to meet your organization’s needs, the utility costs of running new computers, support and maintenance costs of current and new computing infrastructure, as well as employee salaries. As a result, when estimating IT costs, there often is no way to sufficiently get a number that makes you look at IT as anything but a headache.

At Computerware, we offer a solution to runaway IT costs with our comprehensive managed IT services. Our certified and knowledgeable technicians provide complete proactive IT support, and through our numerous vendor relationships we can assist you to customize and implement solutions that make it possible to affordably drive your business forward. Our IT services platform also includes:

• Help desk
• Vendor management
• Remote monitoring
• Network security
• And more

The most advantageous benefit of our managed services platform is how we bill it. We can provide your organization with an easily budgetable, flat-rate program that will keep your network secure, your productivity high, and your operational downtime to a minimum. Call us today at (703) 821-8200 to learn more.