How much to charge for IT services?

jake9891

jake9891

jake9891

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Hi All,

Just wanted to ask all of you for a quick advise. My sister's boyfriend asked me if I could have a look at some problems (all IT related) that they have at their workplace. Long story short I became their "IT admin", it's a small business, so it's not a proper employment, but I said if they have any problems they can contact me. It's anything IT related, at moment I am fixing mistakes of the previous guy that didn't even install any antivirus software on the workstations, and setting up Sage Act, backups etc

Now, they asked me how do I normally charge for providing such services, and I didn't have an answer as I haven't really provided IT services to any businesses before. It's sort of a family business, but they said they will pay me just as they would pay a stranger.

My question is what is the usual way that people charge business for their IT services and what is the appropriate rate for it?

Thanks
 
phone a local company explain what you want done and get a quote.. then tripple it.
 
I think small IT firms tend to charge £40/hour plus mileage. I don't know how much of that £40 you'll see for yourself, as I repaired computers for a small (20-25ish people) firm plus 1st-line support and I was earning £7/hour. I guess a lot of it goes to admin, overheads, insurance, vehicle hire etc.
 
Monserrat said:
I think small IT firms tend to charge £40/hour plus mileage. I don't know how much of that £40 you'll see for yourself, as I repaired computers for a small (20-25ish people) firm plus 1st-line support and I was earning £7/hour. I guess a lot of it goes to admin, overheads, insurance, vehicle hire etc.
Click to expand...

Most of it goes on the Aston the owner drives :)
 
How big is the company? How many members of staff and how many workstations and servers if any?

If your managing their updates, AV, backups etc then a monthly support contract would be anywhere from £100-£1000 a month for a small/medium sized business depending on support requirements and user base.

If your doing it on an hourly rate then minimum of £40/hour.

We charge £55/hour remote work, £65/hour for desktop engineer and £95/hour for a server engineer.
 
I charge my Business clients £20 p/h and I've got a fair number of clients now so keeping my prices low has worked well for me.
 
From what you've said - and assuming this is just a few hours a week/month - I think £40 an hour isn't unreasonable.

Remember the golden rule about discussing prices: be friendly and smile :) don't treat it like something worrying or something not worth worrying about, just be straight and nice about it. You can negotiate.
 
its a fine balancing act - too low and they will wonder what is wrong with you and too high and someone else will be found. Take a look at the company and try to figure out how serious their IT is to them. Then work out a way to remote access their network, charge a base fee for remote maintenance (fixed no of hours per week) then quote something like £40-£50/hr (depending on travelling expenses) to actually go to site for the hands on faults/builds
 
I've got remote access all set up, its about 11 miles from where I live. From what I can tell they don't really care about IT, especially backups etc as long as everything works and the business can continue operating then it's all good. I think I will have to explain to them about worst case scenario. I am not sure how much the guy before me got paid, but looking at what he's done I wouldn't pay him a penny. I will talk to them tomorrow and see what they have to say. Thanks for all your responses
 
This probably adds nothing helpful, but one of the companies locally that I know of charge around £25 an hour, a bit more for the first hour mind, I think it's something like £35 + £25 for each hour after.
 
It's helpful, would be nice to get as many responses as I can, so I can work out hourly rate, as it seems everyone is charging by hour rather than job done
 
Do you have another job? If you do what happens when nothing is working at 9am on a Monday morning and they want you onsite to fix it? Set reasonable expectations and response times. Find out what the other guy charged and add 50%. As long as its at least £40!!!!
 
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