What to Actually Budget for Tech This Financial Year

Nobody starts a business to write a technology budget. But the start of a financial year is when the money gets planned, and "the website stuff" deserves better than being a mystery line item you wince at when the invoices arrive.

This is part two of our New Financial Year Glow-Up week. Part one was the free fixes. This is the money conversation, in plain English, with real numbers. Everything here is in Australian dollars, and one rule before we start: if a quote doesn't say inc. GST or ex. GST, ask. It's a tenth of the price and it tells you a lot about how the rest of the engagement will go.

Tier one: keeping the lights on

This is the boring, non-negotiable layer: your .com.au domain, your hosting, and proper business email at your own domain. All up, for most small businesses, this is coffee money: somewhere in the low hundreds per year, not per month.

Two things matter more than the amounts. First, these should be paid from your accounts, in your name, on your card. Your web person can hold a login, never the keys. The day you part ways with whoever built the site, you should lose a phone number, not your website. Second, if you're paying dramatically more than coffee money for this layer, ask what you're actually getting, because the answer is sometimes "someone else's margin".

Tier two: fixing what leaks

One-off, small-scope work on the site you already have: making it fast, making the forms reliable, wiring up a booking link, cleaning up the things you found in part one that need a professional hand. Think hundreds to a few thousand dollars per fix, done in days.

This is the highest-return money in the whole budget, because it's applied to a site that already has traffic. A faster site, a form that works, and a bookable calendar don't win you new visitors; they stop you wasting the ones you've got.

Tier three: building something

New website, booking system, customer portal, the app your customers keep asking for. This is project money, and it's where the quotes you collect will vary wildly, so here are ours to anchor against: our fixed build sprints start from $7,400 inc. GST, and our day rate is $1,300 inc. GST. A serious small-business build is typically a few weeks of work.

The budgeting trap here is timing. Project money spent on the wrong project is the most expensive mistake in this post, which is exactly what part three covers on Saturday: choosing the build that pays for itself.

One more Australian note: how tech spend is treated at tax time is your accountant's lane. But walking into that conversation with a planned figure beats a shoebox of surprise invoices in June.

Tier four: someone in your corner

The monthly layer: a retainer with people who keep improving things, answer the "is this dodgy?" emails, and fix what breaks before you knew it broke. Not every business needs this from day one. Businesses that lean on their website for bookings and sales usually reach a point where they can't afford not to have it.

The test for whether a retainer is worth it is brutal and simple: can you name what changed last month? If the answer is a list of real improvements, keep it. If the answer is "they renewed some plugins", read the next section.

What you should never be paying for

A few charges to refuse, politely, this financial year:

• Ransom fees. Being charged to access your own domain, hosting or Google accounts. That's not a service, that's a hostage situation.
• The mystery maintenance fee. A monthly charge with no report, no changes, and no answer to "what did this buy?"
• Per-edit pricing for your own words. If changing your trading hours on your own website costs $90 a pop, the site was built to create that invoice.
• SEO reports nobody reads. Twelve pages of graphs, zero new customers. Rankings only matter if the phone rings.

Cheap can be fine. Opaque never is. Good technology money buys you things you can point at.