What an IT budget looks like when someone actually plans it

Ask a small company what their IT budget is and you'll usually get one of two answers: a shrug, or last year's disaster. "We spent about four thousand euros" often decodes to "the server died in March and we paid whatever it took."

That's not a budget. That's a record of surprises.

The companies that feel in control of their technology aren't necessarily spending more. They're spending on purpose. And the structure behind that is simple enough to sketch on one page.

The four buckets

1. Keeping the lights on. Licences, hosting, domains, internet, email, antivirus, backup storage, support contracts. This is the predictable core — it recurs monthly or yearly, and it should be boring. If you can't list these costs from memory, that's the first fix: someone gathers them into one sheet, cancels what nobody uses anymore, and suddenly the "mystery" of IT spending is mostly gone. In the reviews we do, unused licences and forgotten subscriptions are the most common line we cross out.

2. Replacement before failure. Hardware ages on a schedule that is almost rude in its predictability. Laptops get slow and fragile around year four or five; disks fail; the router that was fine for six people struggles with sixteen. A planned budget assumes a laptop lives about five years and replaces the oldest ones each year — a steady, small cost. An unplanned budget replaces machines only when they die, which they do at the worst moment, urgently, at whatever price same-day delivery costs.

3. One improvement per year. Something that moves the business forward rather than keeping it standing: proper Wi-Fi coverage, a monitoring setup, automating a manual process, finally sorting the backups everyone thinks they have. One deliberate project a year, chosen in advance, beats five half-started ones triggered by frustration.

4. The emergency line. Things will still break — the honest budget admits it. A modest reserve for genuine surprises means the surprise costs money, not money plus panic plus a credit decision made under pressure.

Why nobody does this

Because in most small companies, nobody owns it. The accountant sees the invoices but can't judge them. The director approves them but doesn't track them. The "computer guy" knows the systems but isn't asked about money. IT spending ends up being everyone's cost and nobody's plan — a specific case of the pattern we described in the real cost of nobody owning your IT.

The fix isn't a finance department. It's one page, reviewed twice a year, with a name attached to it. What do we pay for continuously? What's due for replacement in the next 12 months? What's this year's one improvement? What's the reserve?

Companies that can answer those four questions stop experiencing IT as a slot machine of bad news. The total spend often barely changes — the shocks are what disappear.

If you'd like that one page to exist for your company, that's a conversation we're happy to start — the free systems review gives you the replacement timeline and the recurring-cost list as a by-product. Get in touch and bring last year's invoices; we'll bring the structure.