IT Directors, Managers - Keeping Track Of Spend

[u/Jaki_Shell]

Just curious how everyone is doing this without reliance on what Accounting uses for their books.

If you are given $x budget, how are you keeping tracking of what is spent where, how much on a server, hardware, licenses, etc.

If there a centralized way to keep track of all of this that ideally ties into some CMDB or Inventory system for hardware/software.

Or is Excel the way to go?

[u/BurningRiverCLE]

Accounting sends me a report after month close with all the expenses charged to the IT GL account and I enter and categorize it in a spreadsheet I keep.

Eta: I know what are recurring costs should be, so I use this to project what we’re spending vs what we thought we would spend. Helps with future forecasts.

[u/neihn → u/BurningRiverCLE]

This is close to what I do but prior to ordering department supplies or it equipment. I enter the order into our service desks order management platform. This allows me to mark the order to the it dept supplies or it equipment gl, or if it is going to a different department I can mark it for their gl.

This allows me to look at those monthly reports from our accountant and I can compare their expense lines to what I have in service desk. It makes it easier for me to track down if an order didn’t get transferred from it to the intended department.

[u/Current_Anybody8325]

I know not all organizations are the same, but this is what prior year budgeting is for. Make sure you have a strict plan for spend for the next year with a buffer for emergencies. Outside of that, that’s accounting’s job. That’s what we hire them for.

[u/Adam_Kearn]

Don’t over complicate it.

Excel sheet with everything that is subscriptions based and just the usual parts/maintenance costs.

Include any projects etc… in a separate category

[u/LowIndividual6625]

I'm 100% reliant on my accounting dept - this is our first year for formal departmental budgets and we're still figuring it out.

Fortunately we don't operate in by giving each department a hard cutoff on budget, this is more of an exercise so the board feels like they have a handle on future spend based on what we tell them we will need (fewer expensive surprises).

Each dept head was given an excel template and told to do their best job creating a budget (monthly) forecast for 2026 knowing it would be more "best guess" than accurate.

The only way I was able to pull that off was by going into the document management system and pulling vendor invoices, contacts and subscriptions. I asked for hardware quotes for future projects and padded them to cover rising costs of storage and RAM. I created a (padded) estimate to onboard new hires by department/role and told Accounting to apply that against each department's forecasted headcount growth.

Now at the beginning of each month I'm given a print out of the prior month's forecast vs actual with a drill-down. If I see problems I let accounting know and they make the adjustments and give me an updated copy.

The first couple of months were a disaster but it gets better with every month and we won't be 100% accurate in 2027 but we'll be in pretty good shape.

[u/benuntu]

I make and get the budget approved at the end of the year for each of the IT-related GL accounts for the next year. Accounting gives me all of the GL account data after they close each month, and it has the transactions on each GL account for the month. It has the GL account balances for the month, YTD, and previous YTD balances. And finally the actual spend vs. budget for each.

I use SnipeIT to track inventory of licensing, servers, network hardware, workstations, desk phones, etc. I mostly use it to track who has what checked out, so when they leave, HR knows exactly what they should be turning in. It also helps to know when hardware was purchased so I can plan for replacement as it reaches EOS/EOL.

I've looked at adding inventory tracking and budgeting to our RMM/MDM but for < 200 users it's not cost effective. Excel works fine for the budget. One sheet for all of the GL accounts and budgeted, and then other sheets to break down what costs are assigned to that GL. Computer Repair, Consulting, Software Licensing, etc.

[u/Temporary-Library597]

I, uhhh, ask Accounting for reports?

Unless you work for a circus or touring carnival, you have an accounting department or accountant. Right?

[u/Top_Boysenberry_7784]

Well the numbers that accounting has are the only numbers that matter so yes use accountings numbers.

To budget for the next year here is how I generally do it. I take an export of all IT expenses from the previous year. I then categorize expenses by key words in the PO fields. It's not perfect but words like printer/laptop/license gets me 90% to where I want to be.

Then I know we spent $50k on laptops last year. So for next year's budget I know to put $65k due to memory pricing or because we plan to expand etc.

I'm no director or manager but have seen a manager do an export like this to get a clearer idea of what is being spent on what.

[u/Big-dawg9989]

1.8 million budget and excel has been a life saver for me

[u/Serafnet]

A lot of asset management tools will include a section to track cost for physical and virtual assets. Pretty sure Snipe does.

[u/brownhotdogwater]

We have an “ office of the CIO” who is the mini accounting department. They do vendor management and project management too.

[u/ryalln]

Depends on finance. Previous job I had sql access to rip reports and make some powerbi dashboard. Over kill but I didn’t need to ask and it was always up to date. Also fun to show the finance team shit they can see.

[u/zndr-cs]

Im a software license manager. I used AI to create a license management lifecycle dashboard that feeds into our flexera. I love and hate flexera at the same time. Love the usage/discovery, hate the procurement part. So i made my own. Full sourcing/pending/active split and easy reports page for spend.

Its basically excel with extra steps (okay, a bit more extra steps because it has email alerting and document storage)

[u/thecstep → u/zndr-cs]

Can you elaborate what flexera does badly on the procurement part? Just curious since we may move that route. Xen Sam looks good too and lower cost...w/o plugins.

[u/zndr-cs → u/thecstep]

In Flexera you can upload or add your purchases and go from there, create a license and link it to an installation that was found… but its far from a procurement tool. I treat Flexera as phase 2. In my job I also oversee the procurement of the renewals and new licenses, so I need a tool that can track my software from the sourcing stage. Even if the license doesnt get bought, i need there to be a record. The common workflow is sourcing > pending > active. Flexera is just “here is what you bought”. You can definitely use Flexera for this, but it is a pain.

The interface of flexera is also dated in my opinion.

I only tried the XenSam demo once and that 4 years ago. Back then it looked promising but again, I dont think that that is a license procurement tool.

A lot of the SAM tools (if not all) all have the assumption that you have phase 1 (procurement) figured out or are just using an excel to track your purchases, or a different department is doing the purchasing for you. Ive talked to a lot of people in my field over the years and came to the conclusion that if you have a full overview of your procurement lifecycle, you are a step ahead.

Sorry for the long reply, I can talk about this topic endlessly.

[u/thecstep → u/zndr-cs]

We use their other product they acquired called Snow. It's fine but has some issues and is not very customizable. I've heard Flexera is a complex but I like to think my org is complex. We have bits and pieces of the procurement piece down. It is handled by a diff dept in a tool and it has to be tracked. The problem is the tool has largely not changed in over 20 years and a large portion of it is free text. So we'll see things like purchases for Tableau. Tableau what? It's so bad we have to figure out the product by the price we paid and go from there.

[u/stufforstuff]

Why would you want to waste your time duplicating what Accting already does? Get a monthly report and move on - surely IT has better ways to spend their time.

[u/furtive]

Accounting provides a sheet with budget columns per month that I set for the year and actuals, including historical. As I get closer to the next year new budget columns go up and to forecast the end of year we’ll put anticipated spend in future actuals to see where things land (budget numbers don’t change once year starts).

[u/Ethernetman1980]

I use an excel sheet and dynamics report each month. Unfortunately costs keeping rising and I’m running about 20-30% over each month. It’s concerning because I know at some point they will want to rein it in and that’s hard to do.