IT Audits: How to Price Them

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.

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, you’re going to have to take your hourly billing rate, and figure that you’re going to spend two or three hours there. You’re 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 you’re charging $95 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 $95, so you’re at a little bit under $500. 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 don’t need to bill IT audits at your full amount. You’re not billing by the hour. You want to give them a certain comfort level that they feel they can afford your services - you’re not out to just run up a huge bill. You’re 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, it’s going to take a couple of hours to come up with some coherent recommendations on what to do first, what it’s going to cost them, and when it can be scheduled. You definitely shouldn’t be giving your expertise away for free, but you also shouldn’t be looking to recover your typical hourly billing rates on IT audits.

It Pays to Discount.

The most important thing here is you’re getting them to pry open their six-ton wallet and prove that they will spend money on your services. That’s extremely important, even if you don’t recover more than 50 percent or 75 percent of your normal hourly billing. Chalk it up to a cost of sales.

It’s up to you what you’re going to charge ultimately, but anywhere in the $250 to $350 range is typical. If you want to go really aggressively, maybe charge $199 or $200. The key thing is to make it a fixed price. The important thing here is that the prospect shows you that they’re willing to spend money on IT audits.

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