IT Budget Creation
The easiest way to figure out what you are currently spending for IT in your business is to use an excel spreadsheet to calculate your expenses. Basically, just record your employees and then add up what licenses you have subscribed to for them. That’s your current monthly cost.
That’s just to get you started. As your business becomes more complicated and you add employees you need to step up your technology and security. What if something happens and there’s downtime? What if you are hacked/breached, your data is compromised, and you have MAJOR downtime?
These are things that happen to businesses EVERY.SINGLE.DAY.
So, you need to add complexity. You need to add security for your network, for your cloud services, and for your computers. Then you need someone to manage it all because it’s getting complicated. You can do it yourself. After all, you started the company, you had the vision, you have the sweat equity in the business, so you may decide to manage your IT.
I would advise against this and point you back to the possibility of a breach. Let’s say your cloud file storage is compromised and you are completely down as a business. Here’s how you can calculate what this would cost you:
Take your total annual salaries for your business and divide by 2080. That’s what EACH hour of downtime costs you. If your payroll is $500k/year, your hourly cost for downtime is $240 EACH hour.
In Q4 2021 the average ransomware recovery time was 20 business days. That’s a month. Payroll alone will cost you $38,400 for those employees not able to work.
Let’s say your revenue is $2mil. For that month of downtime, you have lost almost $150,000 in billable work to clients.
This is just the start. You would have to notify clients of the breach, take a huge reputation hit, and possibly lose employees.
Knowing what your costs are and how to protect your business are crucial to survive and grow. Factoring in proper IT coverage for your business and budgeting for it is the path to success.