When you think about IT costs, the usual culprits are always there: hardware, software and additional support from internal or external providers. But what many businesses forget to budget for is all of the other peripheral expenses that come with using new technology – such as maintenance fees, security upgrades, and break-fixes.
For many companies, the IT department is one of those that suffers first when budget cuts are taking place. You will never be able to keep on top of your tight budgets if you don’t know what’s being spent in the first place! There are numerous costs for information technology services which go under-appreciated or unnoticed by most organizations and businesses today. These include monthly expenses such as bandwidth charges and software maintenance fees but also could entail fees like installing new hardware or labour hours needed at remote offices outside a company’s primary area where these services may not even exist yet because they aren’t near any business centres with an IT staff presence. With proper planning, though, it would help cut down on some unexpected costs during times.
Incompatible technology strategy and business goals
Investing in technology is important to create a strong foundation for your company, but it needs to be done with caution as you don’t want the future of your business resting on one piece of equipment that could malfunction.
You need an IT strategy if you hope to get anything out of all this new tech. It’s not enough just installing servers or workstations and expecting them do everything – they have their limits! The quality and quantity will depend heavily upon how much time, energy, money (and maybe even luck) goes into making sure those machines are aligned well with both current conditions AND long-term goals.
Failing to plan for the future can lead your company into an IT disaster. The last thing you want is a network that’s become too small and out of date, which might mean having to upgrade or replace software entirely–and constantly rebuying hardware just so it keeps up with demand. Balancing tech needs against business goals will help ensure your technology aligns both now and tomorrow.
We’ve discussed how leveraging cloud services can help to save money and prevent this kind of hidden cost in a previous post.
Productivity drain
Your company can’t afford to lose productivity, so get an on-call IT support team. It will be worth the cost in saved time and money when employees are able to focus more of their attention back towards work without having to deal with complex computer issues themselves or hire a third party tech repair service.
Employees are short-handed when it comes to IT support. This means that smaller issues go unreported, and bigger problems can arise from the small ones not being dealt with in a timely manner. If employees do end up taking time out of their day to fix these little things themselves they may be wasting more than just minutes or hours because many big projects could take days for one person’s attention span alone where as if there was an extra set of hands on deck then you would have much less downtime between tasks which is always better at getting work done quicker than procrastinating about it!
If the average employee is spending 10 minutes a day fiddling with something on their PC, that’s around 40 hours per year. If we assume these employees are earning the average hourly rate of £13.94 and they work an 8-hour shift each weekday for 50 weeks out of every 365 days, businesses can be losing over $1K per person annually!
Failing to upgrade old equipment
Life is too short to spend all your time repairing old, broken computers. The more you wait, the less money and productivity you will have in life!
If there’s one thing on this Earth that we should not be wasting our money on it’s fixing a computer or server that doesn’t work right anymore. Think about how much of an investment goes into purchasing new equipment for business use compared to just replacing a malfunctioning piece of hardware – where does saving some change here really make sense?
IT costs can be a surprisingly expensive burden to bear. It might seem like you have them in control, but that’s because the bills are still coming out of someone else’s pocket and not yours- so it doesn’t feel as bad. But think about this – if you don’t know when your next break is going to come or how much it will cost for fixing problems on their end then how do you plan ahead? Investing some capital into lowering operating IT costs saves tons more money than just blindly spending with no forethought!
The more proactive you are in your IT, the easier it will be to control costs. You can reduce hidden expenses by investing a pro-active approach that aligns with other business planning efforts as well as assessing and maintaining systems for risks or future problems they may encounter.
If it seems like your business is lacking any of the above, or if you would like to reach out to discuss your potential hidden costs in greater detail please feel free to contact us.
