Your Team, Minus the IT Day: What It Actually Costs

Your team, minus the IT day: what "one person figures out the printer" actually costs

There is usually one person in a small firm who fixes things. The scanner is offline, the shared drive asks for a password, Teams won't hear anyone, and someone pings "Dave, you're good with computers". Dave is not IT; he has his own job to get on with. This post is the arithmetic on what that arrangement costs, done honestly, with every assumption on the table.

The scenario (assumptions first)

Here is one recurring, unglamorous week: a print server that misbehaves and a file share that keeps prompting for credentials, counted across three groups of people.

• The troubleshooter. Dave, or Priya, or whoever, spends 2.5 hours a month diagnosing: poking the printer queue, testing the share from two machines, finding the setting, applying it, and discovering it broke something small.
• The blocked colleagues. Two other people are stopped or slowed by the same faults. Between them, 2.25 hours a month: waiting, re-sending, working around the broken thing.
• The owner. Someone with a key or a password they shouldn't need asks the director. Call it 20 minutes a month: 0.33 hours.

Total: 5.08 hours a month of skilled time spent on IT that nobody assigned to them.

The rate

The ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings puts median hourly earnings for full-time employees (excluding overtime) at £19.67 in April 2025 (ONS, Employee earnings in the UK: 2025, accessed 3 September 2026). Small-firm staff usually earn around the median or above, so £19.67 is a conservative base.

Assumption: an employer pays roughly 25% on top of gross pay (employer NI, pension, apprenticeship levy where it applies). £19.67 × 1.25 = £24.59/hour loaded cost.

The working

£124.90 × 12 = roughly £1,499 a year, about £1,500, burned on one recurring IT nuisance in a firm with no IT function. That is before the two or three bigger incidents a year you haven't costed: the laptop that dies in January, the mailbox lockdown in April, the "why can't anyone open the accounts folder" day before half-term.

Sanity check the other direction: halve every hour figure and you still clear £750 a year. The number survives being argued with.

The cost that doesn't show in the table

The hours are the visible part. The parts that never appear on an invoice:

• Single-point-of-failure risk. When the person who "is good with computers" goes on leave, the firm's entire IT capability goes with them.
• Quiet workarounds. Saved passwords on shared machines, personal OneDrives, "just email it to me", every workaround is a small hole you're not tracking. (This is exactly what the offboarding checklist in our ex-staff SharePoint audit post catches months later.)
• Licence drift. Dave keeps the tenant ticking over without anyone reviewing what's switched on and what isn't; see the M365 licence stack a five-person firm is paying for.

What actually changes the arithmetic

You need someone accountable for those 5.08 hours, and that does not require hiring a manager. What it needs is a remote-first support arrangement that takes the printer, the share, the mailbox and the licences off everyone's desk, and a monthly report that shows what was fixed and what's coming. Then Dave can go back to being good at the thing you actually pay him for.

If you want the honest version for your firm (what your current setup actually costs and what you'd hand over), the conversation starts at apxdigital.io/it-support.

APX Digital, IT support for remote-first small firms. Birmingham / Coventry / West Midlands.

Info@apxdigital.io · 07753 226214