ICT Management > Budgeting and Funding

Calculating Your Technology Budget

By Lasa Information Systems Team

Organisations need to have a realistic annual budget for IT. This article provides instructions for using our downloadable Excel spreadsheet to provide you with a simple way to calculate your IT budget.

 The spreadsheet breaks down the items of expenditure into the following areas:

• Hardware & Infrastructure
• Software
• Internet
• Training
• Support
• Consumables
• Other

The calculator works on the principle that you need to replace certain items at different times - a computer lasts, on average, around 4 years whereas cabling may last 10 years or more. Software may need upgrading every 4 years, whereas ADSL access is payable every year. The calculator takes all this into account.

If you disagree with any of these you are free to change them.

Typical costs for each item have been inserted - you can change these easily. If, for example, your external support costs are £1,000 per year, then insert this in the appropriate place. If you don't have a server then put 0 in the cost cell. If you have 2 servers then you'll need to raise the amounts accordingly. And so on…

The spreadsheet has been set with a default number of users of 10. If you only have 5 users, for example, change the figure in cell B3 to 5.

The section marked "Other" allows for items which are specific to your organisation - if for example, you have a web designer who keeps your website up to date, that would be a shared cost amongst all your users so should go in one of the last two rows. If you buy design software for one user then that would be one of the 1 user items.

Once you've made all these changes you can see the amount you should be budgeting for at the bottom of the spreadsheet. Figures are rounded to the nearest pound so there may be some differences. If you are not VAT registered then you'll need to include VAT in your budget total.

The calculation assumes that you pay VAT on everything - this may not actually be the case.

Download the Technology Budget Calculator (24 KB Excel file). Hint - right click on the link and select Save as.

If you have a special project budgeted for the year, e.g. replacing all your old monitors with flat screens or a new website, then this is better budgeted for separately.