It Audits How To Price Them

IT Audits: How to Price Them

Summary: IT audits should be priced using your hourly rate as a guide. Give a discount, though, so you can get a foot in the door with your customers from performing your IT audits.

IT audits, IT-audits

Article Body: How do you go about pricing IT audits? In this article, you'll learn that it should be based on your rate, but you will also want to give a discount to get your foot in the door.

Use Your Hourly Rate as a Guide

For IT audits, youre going to have to take your hourly billing rate, and figure that youre going to spend two or three hours there. Youre going to probably spend another hour back in the shop writing up the reports for the IT audits and writing an estimate. Figure out what you need to charge for IT audits based on your average hourly billing rate.

So for example, if for basic fieldwork youre charging $ an hour, and you anticipate that between time on-site at the client, gathering the information for these IT audits, and follow-up question/answer sessions afterwards, you spend five hours. That is five hours at $, so youre at a little bit under $. Now you want to round down and discount.

Don't Bill the Full Amount

The gist of it here is that you want to get your foot in the door. You dont need to bill IT audits at your full amount. Youre not billing by the hour. You want to give them a certain comfort level that they feel they can afford your services - youre not out to just run up a huge bill. Youre really out to discover what your future clients' biggest problems are, help them organize, and help them make heads or tails of what needs to be addressed.

Whatever the problems, its going to take a couple of hours to come up with some coherent recommendations on what to do first, what its going to cost them, and when it can be scheduled. You definitely shouldnt be giving your expertise away for free, but you also shouldnt be looking to recover your typical hourly billing rates on IT audits.

It Pays to Discount.

The most important thing here is youre getting them to pry open their six-ton wallet and prove that they will spend money on your services. Thats extremely important, even if you dont recover more than percent or percent of your normal hourly billing. Chalk it up to a cost of sales.

Its up to you what youre going to charge ultimately, but anywhere in the $ to $ range is typical. If you want to go really aggressively, maybe charge $ or $. The key thing is to make it a fixed price. The important thing here is that the prospect shows you that theyre willing to spend money on IT audits.

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