IT Budget Template for Mid-Market Companies (With the Contract Labor Lines Filled In)

Open an IT budget template and you’ll usually find one row for outside help. It says Contractors. There’s a number beside it that nobody in the room can trace back to anything, which is why it’s the first row a CFO circles when the file lands in their inbox. Fair enough. This workbook splits that row into seats. It’s free for a work email, and it’s built for companies between fifty million and five hundred million dollars in revenue, the kind where a controller or a CFO owns IT and nobody’s sitting in a CIO chair. Seven tabs. A summary up front, the rates behind the seats at the end, and five budget tabs in between. Licenses, infrastructure, run support, projects and contract labor.

Everything except the contract seats stays blank, on purpose. Your ERP renewal isn’t something we can guess, and sample numbers would only flatter the file. Blue on yellow is what you type. Black is a formula. Green comes from another tab. Seven seats come priced at KORE1 median bill rates, by the hour. An ERP consultant at ninety-one dollars, an IT project manager at a hundred and sixteen, and a software engineer at a hundred and five. Then the run seats. A systems administrator at fifty-seven dollars, help desk at forty-nine, a security analyst at eighty-two, and a mid-level network engineer at a hundred and six, which is modeled from federal wage data. A hundred and ten KORE1 placements sit behind the six observed seats. Plenty of those are in Southern California, so expect a metro difference if your team’s in Dallas or Boston. One line, worked out. A contract project manager for three months is forty hours a week for thirteen weeks. That’s five hundred twenty hours at a hundred and sixteen dollars, or about sixty thousand four hundred dollars.

The workbook budgets bill rates, because that’s what lands on the invoice. You should still know what’s inside one. Devin Hornick, a KORE1 partner, walks through it with round numbers that are easy to check on the back of an envelope. Say pay’s a hundred dollars an hour, as an example. Twenty-four percent burden makes a hundred and twenty-four loaded. A bill rate around a hundred and fifty to a hundred and sixty covers that, plus recruiting, account management and margin. Burden means employer payroll taxes, required insurance and California paid sick leave. And it’s often left out of a quoted markup, so the percentage a firm tells you and the invoice you get can be two different conversations. Ask one question. Does that percentage sit on pay, or on loaded cost? Same number, very different bill.

Every line carries a flag. Yes counts in the CapEx-eligible column on the summary. Review stays out of that column and shows on its own until you decide. No is plain operating expense. The ERP consultant, the project manager and the software engineer ship set to Review, since any of them can sit on a funded software build. Nothing counts as CapEx until you change it to Yes. Devin’s blunter about it. If they’re CapEx, that’s wonderful. If they’re OpEx and they’re sitting on your budget, I’m not sure if they’re the greatest contractor to keep. The rule’s moving, too. FASB’s update for internal-use software removes project stages, and it applies to annual periods beginning after December fifteenth, twenty twenty-seven. So a calendar-year company stays on the old stages through twenty twenty-seven, unless it adopts early. That isn’t accounting advice. Confirm every Yes with your auditor.

Five passes, in this order. Enter your revenue. Fill in the three run tabs. List the funded projects. Set the contract seats. Then flag CapEx and add real quotes. Budget one afternoon if your renewal dates are in one place, and rather longer if they aren’t. Leave off whatever nobody’s agreed to pay for yet. And when a real quote comes in, type it into the quoted rate column, where it overrides the index on that row.

What percentage of revenue should an IT budget be? About six percent is the average in Deloitte’s twenty twenty-six Global Technology Leadership Study. That study surveyed companies with a billion dollars or more in revenue, though, so treat it as a reference point and not as a target for a hundred million dollar company. The summary tab works out your own number. How often do the rates change? Every quarter. These come from the KORE1 Contract Rate Index for the fourth quarter of twenty twenty-six, and the next update’s due in January. Get the workbook at KORE1.com and type your own numbers in. When you want quotes in that rate column, send us the roles, the quarters and the metro, and we’ll send bill rates you can drop straight in.