For many of us, it’s that time again. Time to plan for next year’s budget. As I work through my team’s budget ask, here are a few things I’ve learned:

• Look at your year to date spend: In my company, I receive a monthly financial statement showing what I spent that month in payroll, travel, training, etc. and it also shows year to date spend, too. As I’m doing budget planning, I’ll start by creating a spreadsheet looking at what was budgeted for this year, what we’ve spent so far, our projected spend for the rest of the year and what I’ll be asking for next year, by line item. Understanding the dynamics in play lays out a good foundation to understand the road ahead.

• Payroll is the hardest thing for me get approved. People are our most expensive asset and no one wants to add more IT overhead into a company. If I think I need more people, I start with an Erlang Calculator. This tool is great at forecasting staffing needs based on projected incident volume. While it’s typically used for analyzing phone support, it can be creatively adapted for other support channels, too.

• Training matters: I’m working through the goal of getting my team 100% HDI certified in their roles, ensuring that we all operate in the same way, speak the same language and leverage industry best practices. It’s hard to pull people from the phones to go to training, but we’ve had success leveraging HDI’s self-paced training and purchasing a few courses at a time. I’m also including funds for new hires, too.

• Set aside money for recognition. Food, gift cards and other small tokens of appreciation help to maintain employee morale and lessen turnover. While I have gotten pushback because other IT departments don’t typically get funds here, I’ve built business cases on the relatively small amount requested versus the much larger cost of turnover to get funded each year.

• Make room for conferences. Next year will be like my 15th Support World Live conference. My secret: I live and breathe HDI. When we developed new SLAs and OLAs this year, I told my boss that the foundations for them came from that conference. When we revised our major incident process this year, some of the steps in it came from a conference session I attended. The Erlang Calculator referenced earlier? Yup, that came from another conference session, as did the design of the self-service password reset systems we use. We implemented AI on our service desk this year, using a vendor that I first met in the Expo Hall two years ago. I constantly demonstrate the ROI from attending these all year long, which makes getting budget approval to attend easy each year.

• Don’t forget the little stuff. In my company, my department pays for headsets, laptops, keyboards, mice, etc. used by my staff. For this, I simply look at the spend over a few years and guess at a solid number to use.

Going into the budget meetings, I’m ready. Along with my request, I have my budget comparison spreadsheet, my Erlang Calculator, all needed business cases for new spend, side data for additional estimated costs and and anything else that I need to show that I’ve done my homework and I’m ready to go. Wish me luck!