One of the best ways to keep your technology humming along at its best is to stay on top of maintenance. Just as you need to get your car’s oil changed every few thousand miles, so too must you do regular maintenance on your technology. Proactive maintenance will keep things running more smoothly for longer.
While eventually you will need to upgrade your technology, prolonging the time between expensive tech purchases or costly emergency repairs just makes smart fiscal sense. Planning a maintenance budget, however, can feel overwhelming when you don’t know where to start. Here are some factors to consider so you can most accurately plan for future maintenance expenses.
- Evaluate historical data – When planning for the future, the best place to look is in the past. What have you historically spent on tech maintenance? How much of those costs were reactive expenses versus proactive maintenance? The better your data, the more accurately you can plan a future budget. When you start having to guess, the farther you will get from creating a budget that is useful.
- Understand priorities – Budget planning requires close collaboration with all stakeholders. From a tech perspective at law firms, it’s important to understand what technology is critical to the attorneys’ day-to-day work. If there are tech resources that are important but not essential to the everyday, know how these fall within the hierarchy of budget planning too. Having a healthy budget in place for those essential tech items will help you avoid dipping into emergency funds to cover them.
- Plan for emergencies – Speaking of emergencies, you should also plan for those. Keep reserves set aside to cover expenses you couldn’t anticipate or prevent with maintenance.
- Consider hidden costs – Additional one-off costs can easily get overlooked when budgeting. Examples include licensing costs, processing fees or procurement costs. Evaluating past spend will highlight potentially hidden areas to look for as you plan your budget.
To create the most accurate tech maintenance budget, rely on data and collaboration to ensure your costs are accounted for and your priorities can continue to be met. To learn more about costs associated with Mac technology, get in touch with our team at Honeycrisp. We focus on helping Apple loving lawyers ensure their tech is operating at full capacity.
