Well folks, it’s been a wild ride talking about budgeting. We started with your budget and IT environment as whole, then moved onto CapEx vs. OpEx, on premises vs. the cloud, IT budget cycles, and – most recently – how to go about building an IT budget. For our last blog of this series, we’ll be talking about how to get your budget approved.
When it comes to planning out what you’ll need for the coming budgetary year, it requires many different skills – strategy, math, and persuasion. We’ve been helping our clients plan ahead and budget for over 20 years. To help, here are some tips on how to get your budget approved.
How To Get Your Budget Approved
Plan ahead
This should go without saying but… don’t procrastinate. You need to analyze what renewals are coming up, assess what needs replacing, and then look ahead toward what you’ll need to keep up with business growth and goals. Think about how your organization likes to budget. Does it prefer CapEx or OpEx? That’ll impact what types of initiatives you’ll want to plan for.
Meet with your vendors and talk through what options are available. They can provide you with preliminary pricing.
List out the pains you’re going to be solving
Accompany your budgetary items with what pains they’re solving. For example, a “network refresh” of $45,000 might address “accommodating exponential growth and strain on the network, and/or offsetting slowness and timeouts for users accessing critical programs.”
Think through why you need each of the line items in your budget and write a sentence or two about what problems they solve from a business standpoint – talk about how downtime or outages affect productivity, not just how it’s time-consuming and annoying for IT.
Tie it to business outcomes
Behind every pain point is a business driver or need. A need for real-time access to the ERP is due to the company’s aggressive sales goals, or adding an immutable backup appliance (such as Ootbi by Object First) might satisfy the growing concern for cybersecurity resilience. Every decision is motivated by a hope of gain or a fear of loss – use that to your advantage when you create your justification for your budgetary items.
Leverage your vendor relationships
If you need help preparing to sell up the management chain for new initiatives, lean on your vendor to help – they position and sell all the time. Your reps can also help you make the business case in meetings, or at least prepare you so you can do it yourself. They can also provide you with critical information about supply chain and shipping delays, which could play into your overall budgetary plan, the timing of accounting processes, and other business functions.
Trust me, your vendor reps would be delighted to help you advocate for your new initiative.
Make a “just in case” list
Sometimes businesses find themselves with extra cash at the end of the year and want to spend it in order to avoid taxes, or they have a “use it or lose it” policy. Have a list together of additional initiatives (but don’t forget about the timeline of cutting POs or rules on receiving and your budget year) should this fortuitous event arise for you.
We have decades if experience helping businesses create their budgets, and we can help you get it approved. Contact us using the information below to learn about our proven processes, plan ahead, and feel confident – not confused.
Learn more about making cent$ of IT budgeting!