IT Budget Planning Checklist Template

The hardware acquisition model and the cloud answer recorded on the first task decide which Phase 3 tasks appear.

• Open the budget and record the year, deadline and approver — finance’s submission date, how hardware is acquired, whether cloud services are in scope, and who approves
• Use finance’s planning assumptions unchanged — inflation, pay rises and exchange rates come from their pack, not from IT
• Agree the cost categories with finance — licences and SaaS, cloud, hardware, support, telecoms, staff and contractors, training and projects, mapped to the chart of accounts
• Pull this year’s IT actuals and forecast outturn — from the ledger, including card spend and purchase orders raised outside IT
• Find technology spend sitting in other departments’ budgets — SaaS bought on expenses still needs supporting, securing and renewing

• List every licence and SaaS subscription with its renewal date — seats bought, seats in use and the expected price at renewal
• Build the contract renewal calendar — support, licences, leases and circuits with their notice periods, so cancellations happen before auto-renewal
• Cost support and maintenance for the year — warranties that end, and extended support quotes for anything kept past end of life
• Cost telecoms and connectivity — circuits, mobile contracts and phone services, with contract end dates
• Cost IT staff, contractors and training — finance’s pay assumptions, open roles, certifications and conferences
• Mark spend to cut before adding anything — unused seats, overlapping tools and contracts for systems already retired

The depreciation task appears when hardware is bought, the lease task when it is leased, both for a mix. The two cloud tasks appear only when cloud services are in scope.

• Pull device ages and warranty dates from the asset register — laptops, desktops, servers, storage and network kit
• Apply the refresh policy to find what is due — a three- to five-year cycle for laptops is common; the policy decides, not the loudest complaint
• Check end-of-support dates for operating systems and platforms — Windows 10 extended security updates cost more each year they are kept
• Split purchased hardware into capital spend and the depreciation it adds — with finance’s capitalisation threshold and useful lives
• List device leases ending in the year — with the decision to return, extend or replace, and the return costs
• Forecast cloud spend from the trend plus known changes — growth, new workloads, migrations and anything being switched off
• Plan cloud commitments that start or expire in the year — one- or three-year terms for the steady baseline only

• Collect the project pipeline from the business and from IT — each with a sponsor, a cost estimate and the quarter it would land
• Price each project’s running cost as well as its build cost — licences, support and staff time that continue after go-live
• Bring in the costed actions from the capacity plan — hardware, cloud and licence growth already approved in principle
• Add the costs that follow headcount — devices, licences and accounts for every planned hire, at finance’s start dates
• Rank projects with their sponsors — required (compliance or end of support), already committed, and discretionary

• Classify each line as capex or opex with finance — using the company’s capitalisation policy, not IT’s preference
• Confirm how software and cloud implementation costs are treated — IFRS and US GAAP differ, so ask finance which applies before you promise a capital project
• Phase every line by month — renewals in the month they invoice, hardware in the month it ships
• Set a contingency line and the rule for releasing it — agreed with finance and released by the approver, not absorbed into run costs
• Prepare committed, recommended and stretch versions — what each funding level buys, and the risk the lowest one leaves

The approver named on the first task records a decision, and the checklist halts until they do.

• Write the IT budget pack — a one-page summary, line detail, assumptions, changes from last year and the risks of each version
• Walk finance through the pack before the deadline — growth lines explained early are less likely to be cut late
• Approve the IT budget — the approver records Approved or Not approved against the final version; no new commitments are made until they do
• Record every cut and the risk it leaves — deferred items with an owner and the quarter they will be looked at again
• Load the approved lines into the ledger and the renewal calendar — and tell each line owner their number

Each review falls due at the end of its quarter of the budget year, so the checklist stays open until the year closes.

• Review Q1 spend against budget line by line — explain every variance over the tolerance agreed with finance
• Review Q2 and reforecast the full year — return confirmed savings or move them to deferred items, with the approver’s agreement
• Review Q3 and settle renewals due early next year — their notice periods often end before next year’s budget is approved
• Close Q4 with the outturn and lessons for next year — the figures and notes that open next year’s Phase 1