The IT budget template for multi-location businesses

This is a working IT budget template. Copy the table into any spreadsheet, swap in your own vendors, and you have a live budget instead of a guess. No download, no email required. The structure below is the same one we use when we take apart a company's technology spend in an assessment.

The template

The rows are examples. Yours will run longer, and that's the point: most companies discover line items during this exercise that nobody currently owns.

Two columns do most of the work. Renewal tells you when you have leverage, because a contract is negotiable in the window before it renews and locked the day after. Owner ends the game of every invoice being someone else's problem. If you want the renewal side broken out in more detail, we built a separate contract renewal calendar template for exactly that.

What goes in each category

Connectivity and telecom. Internet at every site, any remaining phone lines, point-to-point circuits, and the taxes and fees that ride along on carrier invoices. List each site separately even when the vendor is the same. Per-site rows are how you spot the one location paying triple for the same service, which happens more often than anyone expects.

Voice. Your phone system, contact center seats if you have them, conferencing add-ons. Count actual seats against what you're billed for. The gap between the two is a common find.

Software and SaaS. Every subscription, including the ones bought on department credit cards that never touched an IT review. Pull your card statements for anything recurring. This category is where budgets are most wrong, because nobody sees the whole picture until someone builds it. Our assessment checklist has the full list of what to gather.

Cloud and hosting. Infrastructure, storage, backup. If the bill moves month to month, budget the trailing average and note the trend rather than last month's number.

Security. Endpoint, email security, identity tools, cyber insurance if you carry it. Watch for overlap here; security tools accumulate, and two products covering the same threat is its own line of waste.

Hardware. Refresh cycles, not just this year's purchases. If laptops turn over every four years, a quarter of the fleet belongs in every annual budget. Lumping hardware into “whenever something breaks” is how a quiet year gets followed by a brutal one.

IT services. Managed service providers, support contracts, one-off consulting. Note what each contract actually covers, because scope creep runs in both directions.

Keep one-time projects in their own section at the bottom. Mixing a $40,000 network upgrade into recurring monthly costs wrecks every comparison you'll try to make next year.

The multi-location part

Shared costs need a rule. Pick one, allocate by headcount or by site, and apply it everywhere. Which rule you pick matters less than using the same one consistently, because the goal is comparability between sites, not accounting perfection.

Then read the budget side by side, site by site. Identical locations should cost roughly the same to run. When one doesn't, there's either a reason or a finding. Legacy contracts from before an acquisition, a circuit nobody cancelled, a site that got quoted at a bad moment. The per-site view is the entire advantage of doing this at a multi-location company, and it's the view carriers and vendors hope you never build. There's more on this pattern in our guide to multi-location technology costs.

Keeping it alive

A budget you build once and file away is a snapshot, and snapshots age fast. The cadence that works: touch it quarterly, and check it against actual invoices twice a year, because the budget says what you agreed to pay and the invoice says what you're actually paying. Those drift apart. Billing errors, mid-term price escalators, and seats added in a hurry all land on the invoice first.

One warning from experience: don't build next year's budget by adding 3% to this year's. Roll-forward budgeting carries every existing mistake into the future and gives it a raise. The template exists so you can rebuild from actual line items instead. If the rebuilt number looks meaningfully different from what you've been assuming, that gap is worth understanding before your next renewal cycle. Our guide on reducing technology spend covers where the differences usually come from.

By Shane Stewart, Founder. Last updated: July 2026.

Stackstone Advisory is an independent technology advisor for mid-market and multi-location businesses. If you'd rather have us build this picture for you, the Technology Spend Assessment is free, or you can estimate your potential savings in about a minute.