A support contract is a price for a set of assumptions: how many people you have, how many devices, how much of the estate is still on your premises, how quickly you expect somebody to pick up the phone. Organisations change faster than contracts do, and almost nobody goes back to check which assumptions have quietly stopped being true.
The result is not usually dramatic overcharging. It is a contract that still pays for on-site visits you stopped needing when the office emptied out, or for server support on hardware that went to the recycler two years ago.
What you are actually buying
Ask for the schedule rather than the summary. The summary is a page of reassurance; the schedule is where the numbers live. You are looking for the unit the price is built on, and whether that unit still describes you.
If your supplier cannot tell you how many devices they are currently charging you for, that is the finding. You do not need to look any further to justify the conversation.
The second thing worth reading is the response-time table, specifically the definition of when the clock starts. A four-hour response measured from the moment a human triages the ticket is not a four-hour response.
The three lines that matter
When examining the billing schedule, look past the headline monthly figure and isolate three specific line items:
- Per-user versus per-device pricing: If your contract charges per device rather than per named user, you are almost certainly paying twice for staff who have both a laptop and a desktop, or for meeting room screens that generate two tickets a year.
- The boundary between support and project work: A contract that looks inexpensive on paper often excludes routine administrative tasks (setting up a starter, offboarding a leaver, configuring multi-factor authentication) and invoices them separately as billable project hours.
- Legacy infrastructure cover: Check whether you are still paying for server operating system maintenance, tape backup rotation, or on-premises exchange support for workloads that moved to Microsoft 365 or cloud storage years ago.
What a fair price looks like
In the UK SME market, fully managed IT support typically sits between £45 and £75 per user per month. What separates the bottom of that band from the top is not responsiveness: it is what is bundled into the core service.
A transparent agreement at £65 per user should include endpoint security monitoring, cloud backup licensing, standard joiner and leaver moves, and regular strategic reviews. An agreement at £35 per user that bills £120 an hour for every new employee setup is not a cheaper contract: it is merely unpredictable.
The test of fairness is simple: your monthly IT bill should vary only when your headcount changes, not because somebody had to configure a printer.
Two questions to ask
Before you sign an annual renewal or agree to an inflation adjustment, ask your supplier two direct questions:
First: “Can you export the current list of active user accounts and serial-numbered devices you billed us for on last month’s invoice?”
If they cannot produce this list within twenty-four hours, their billing is running on historical assumptions rather than real-time directory sync.
Second: “How many hours of out-of-scope work did you invoice us over the past twelve months, and what were the five largest items?”
If out-of-scope invoices exceed fifteen percent of your total annual retainer, the contract does not fit the reality of how your organisation operates.
None of this requires an expensive consultancy exercise. It requires an afternoon and a willingness to ask a supplier something slightly awkward. If the answers are unsatisfying, that is when it is worth getting somebody independent to run a clean, competitive tender.
