Kids, cover your ears. Thanksgiving deals aren’t the best time to buy PC parts. We’re not saying that Black Friday Week at NeweggBusiness isn’t awesome fun. But we know you’re old enough to understand tech discounts aren’t magical November miracles.
As a mature adult IT purchaser, you know holiday electronics blowouts do not constitute a procurement strategy in any conventional sense. You’ve probably had this suspicion for some time already.
Holiday surprises are a lot of fun. But you didn’t get into IT for surprises. After a certain length of time working with technology, you learn that surprises are overrated. In fact, IT surprises are mostly just expensive, and not a lot of fun.
How to save like it’s Cyber Monday every day of the year
Here’s the good news. You can live every day like Cyber Monday if you’re smart about planning. Here are seven practices to live by all year around to save on the technology you purchase for work.
- Securing fair budgeting for maintenance isn’t a gift. Earn it. Not every stakeholder will embrace the costs associated when running sound IT operations. Contextualize spending in language financial types understand—cost of downtime, ROI, efficiency increases, and so forth—document with a one-page IT proposal.
- Emphasize that it’s impossible to shop for bargains when faced with an emergency purchase. This opens up important conversations about refresh cycle. Look at how the City of Ontario saved on a new SAN by implementing this practice.
- There will be pressure to forgo backups. Data loss is a mistake you cannot afford. The 3-2-1 backup chart will help get the point across to the bean counters in charge of budgeting.
- Holiday blowout deals are fun, but stock your IT supply closet with the brands and products that you trust. Use your NeweggBusiness account to set price alerts to remind when yourself when prices are low.
You can set price alerts for any product from the product page. - If you outgrow your IT before it’s five years old, consider that a waste of company money. You lose out on equipment depreciation tax write-offs prematurely. More about this in Owning the IT Procurement Cycle guide.
- It’s almost the end of the year. It’s time to familiarize yourself with the IRS tax code for writing off IT equipment expenditures. You can write off IT purchases even if you lease or finance your IT spending.
- Don’t forget that your account executive works for you. We love hearing from customers. It’s never an interruption when you call us. The more we know, the better we serve.
