What Are The Benefits Of A Monthly IT Contract?

When looking for business IT support, you can find a range of contracts to choose from. You can choose to Pay As You Go also known as break/fix, pay in advance for block hours, or chose a fixed price IT support that is paid for on a monthly basis. 

The biggest benefit of a fixed price model is that you know just how. much you’re paying each month which gives you greater financial clarity than other contract models. It’s also better for cash flow and your IT costs essentially just become another commodity. Here are some of the other major benefits of a monthly IT contract. 

1. A fixed price IT support contact can cost you less – Paying for IT support on a break/fix basis is a complete unknown cost to your business because you don’t know how much you’ll need to use it. Adhoc support often involves unexpected invoices also. 
2. You only have a single invoice to deal with – Rather than having numerous invoices for everything your IT provider does, a monthly fixed price agreement only sends one single monthly invoice. So, less things for your accounts department to deal with.  A small win but still a win.
3. You should have less downtime – Things such as monitoring, and maintenance is a feature of most fixed price IT support contracts. Things like hard drive space, server errors, and performance issues are typically monitored. This allows the IT company to react to small issues before they become a big problem – having you time and money because your systems stay online. 
4. Greater Financial Clarity – Knowing how much your IT will cost you each month allows you to plan and budget for it, therefore giving you greater financial clarity. In contrast, a break/fix agreement will mean you incur costs you havent been able to plan for and may cause cash flow problems. 
5. Proactivity – Having an IT Managed Services Provider monitor and support your IT infrastructure will ensure that you have less ongoing support needs, broken hardware and user issues. They will also put a plan in place/IT Roadmap that will ensure that your IT is always leading edge and further proofed. Waiting for things to break is not the right way to support your business.