IT Financial Management

Financial management breaks in predictable places as a technology company scales: revenue recognised in one country, costs booked in another, and a regulator in a third asking why the two do not reconcile. For fifteen years I have worked at the seam between engineering and corporate finance.

What people arrive with

The conversation usually starts two weeks before a board meeting: someone sits down to reconcile the budget against actuals and finds that the gap cannot be explained. Some of the lines were entered by people who no longer answer for them, and the word “infrastructure” covers a sum the size of two engineers’ annual salaries.

Sometimes the gap is a one-off. More often it turns out the budget was never a plan: technology is measured in load, deadlines and failure risk, money is measured in another frame entirely, and nobody translates between them. That is my job.

Financial management of the IT budget

Most budgets are built by taking last year’s file and adding ten percent. Such a budget cannot be defended: you cannot see which line belongs to which decision. I build it differently: a line enters only together with the decision that created it and the date of that decision. Defending the budget then becomes a conversation about decisions rather than percentages.

• Capital and operating spend separated by the nature of the cost, not by whichever booking is convenient.
• Allocation to cost centres, so each unit sees what its own infrastructure costs.
• Variance reviewed not for the report, but to find out whether the gap will repeat next quarter.

In the UAE there is local detail on top: the VAT regime, the difference between a free zone and a mainland entity, how costs are recognised between related entities.

Evaluating an investment: ROI and TCO

The purchase price is the clearest and the least useful number in an investment decision. What counts is three-year cost of ownership: licences, infrastructure, rollout, downtime during the switch, the team’s time, and the cost of leaving if the platform turns out wrong. That last line is almost never in the vendor’s proposal, and it is most often the decisive one. I build the model in three scenarios to see which assumption drives the result; for IFRS reporting, NPV and IRR are added.

That is how Monolith Plus was costed. The word “efficiency” never appeared in the case: what appeared was the cost of processing the flow as it grew from 10,000 operations a day to more than 100,000, calculated twice, on the old architecture and on the reworked one. The difference between those two totals was the return on the investment, and it could be checked before signing.

Where the money leaks quietly

Large IT costs are under control: they are visible and they get discussed. The leak runs through small recurring lines that are not worth a conversation on their own.

• Licences still paid for people who left six months ago.
• Test environments spun up for one experiment and left running for good.
• Two tools doing one job, bought by different departments.

Sometimes the lever is architectural rather than contractual: in MStar the move to microservices cut infrastructure cost by 40 %. But a saving that raises the risk of downtime costs more than it saves: a standby link that sat idle for a year pays for itself in the first hour the main one is down.

Numbers for an investor or a bank

An investor looks less at the forecast than at what it is built from. So the three-to-five-year model is built so that any assumption changes in one cell: a forecast you cannot recalculate in the meeting works against you.

The second part is preparing for the review: gaps in the reporting, rights to the code and unsigned contracts are found in advance. The technical side is covered in Technology due diligence for investors, and the whole pack for a round is prepared under investor readiness and due diligence.

Disclosure expectations differ between DIFC and ADGM, and UAE banks have their own, so the pack is assembled for the specific reader. One thing I leave alone: how access to customer data is arranged. An investor’s question about breaches is answered by information security.

Stack

The report is built where the company already keeps its accounts. Dashboards I build in Microsoft Power BI if it is already paid for, and in Metabase if it is not.

Layer	Tools
Accounting and ERP	1C:Enterprise, SAP, QuickBooks
Budgets and models	Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets
Data behind the numbers	PostgreSQL, exports from the accounting system, reconciliation against the statement
Infrastructure spend	AWS Cost Explorer, a register of licences, cost-centre tags
Documents and routine	n8n, DocuSign

What I do not do

• I do not keep the books or file statutory returns: that is a licensed accountant’s work.
• An IFRS audit opinion is not my document. My work ends earlier: gaps between the management figure and the statutory one are explained in writing before the auditor gets there.
• No model has ever made an investor say yes. A good one removes the reasons to say no, and that is where my part ends.
• I do not fit a model to the answer someone wants: if the arithmetic does not support the decision, I will show the arithmetic.

How the engagement runs

The first thing I produce is a single number: what the company spent on IT last year in total, subscriptions, contractors and people included. Assembling it from invoices, contracts and licences takes two weeks, and it almost always differs from the number quoted at the board. Then comes the line by line breakdown: what each item goes on, what it costs per year, and what can be closed straight away.

The main part is the budget model, the calculations for live and planned investments, reporting on your data, and handover to your team. Ten to fourteen weeks, tied to the closing calendar: the model has to survive two consecutive month ends, otherwise there is no telling whether the result reproduces.

The project costs $45,000 (AED 165,150) for the scope fixed at the end of those first two weeks. What stays with you is models with the formulas open, no hidden sheets and no macros, dashboards on your own infrastructure, and the person who ran them alongside me.

Related services

If the nearest task is a round, start with investor readiness and due diligence. A budget that follows a development plan calls for strategic planning. The financial consequences of outages are costed under risk management, and a review of the whole stack is IT consulting.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you replace a CFO?

No. I close the seam between technology and finance: I cost IT spend and investments and present them in a form the board can read. Treasury and tax are the finance lead’s work.

Access to the accounting system takes weeks to approve. Does that hold up the project?

No. Exports are enough at the start: supplier contracts, infrastructure invoices and the current budget. Read access speeds up the reconciliation.

The budget for the year is already approved. Is there any point starting now?

Yes, and mid-year is easier than December: you can see actual performance rather than intentions. I do not rewrite approved figures; I work out where the variance came from. You enter the next cycle with a model that is actually justified.

Entities in a free zone and on the mainland: does that complicate the numbers?

Yes, but predictably. Shared costs have to be split by a rule that holds at every month end: without it the figures of the two entities stop reconciling by the time a round arrives. I cost them separately and roll them into one picture.

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Ready to Get Started?

Check one thing before the call: whether a single annual IT spend figure exists, subscriptions and people included. If there is no such number, that is where the work starts. Book a spend review.