Budgets and accounting can become a great headache if records are not kept properly. You may know by experience how painful closing accounts can be at the end of the year, as you have to rifle through files to trace every bill, every salary slip to make the debit balance credit. We hope that our templates devised under the Budget Toolkit will be of help in keeping these records.

Purchase Orders:- Everytime you sign a purchase order for some equipment, software, license or service, do remember to have a summary of it stored in a centralised place. Merely filing a hard copy away in a large box-file will not do. Our simple Purchase Order Template will help you track each purchase order by date, vendor, purchase type and cost. You can also arrange your orders by parameter, especially when you have to decide where your biggest costs are happening and how you can trim them.

Salaries:- In the course of the year you will hire folk, some will leave, and after an appraisal there will be raises and promotions. Besides, there may be advances on salary, taxes and other deductions you must keep track of. For each employee whose salary check you have to pay out, it helps to keep a record of how much you are paying out each month in a centralized place. This will come in handy as a major source of data when preparing your budget, so you make decisions accordingly. Our Salary Template will help you do this.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO):- As mentioned in the introductory blogpost on Budgeting for IT, the overall cost of an asset you acquire isn’t just the money you paid out while acquiring it. TCO is similar to Hardware Capitalization (HC) when applied to tangible assets, but it is also applicable to software and other intangibles to which HC doesn’t apply. You have to factor in depreciation (if applicable), additional unavoidable costs (e.g. if you buy a laptop you may have to buy an antivirus and a net connection), the cost of people you may have to hire, server space (e.g. if you book a domain, the server space has to be also accounted) and so on. And then there will be maintenance and/or upgrade costs and so on.

We have created a TCO Template to help you deal with this. What it does is help you list out every possible cost associated with the basic cost, and take your calculations forward from there.

In the next blog, we will discuss resource allocation and project summary.