The hourly invoice you didn't expect
Break-fix shops bill in increments — and most of those increments are billable from the moment the email is read. Phone calls, drive time, "five-minute fixes" that turn into half an hour. The hourly rate isn't the cost; the multiplier is.
The downtime nobody's measuring
Every hour your team waits on a frozen workstation, a stuck email, a printer that won't talk to the network — that's payroll spent on nothing. Most small businesses lose more to small downtime than to any big incident, and almost none of them track it.
The vendor sprawl tax
Antivirus from one vendor, backup from another, M365 from a third, the firewall from a fourth — and someone has to manage all of them. Each one renews on a different cycle, with a different price increase, on a different invoice. Consolidating is usually cheaper than negotiating.
The "free advice" that wasn't free
When the part-time IT consultant gives advice on hardware, the spec is rarely cheap. Markups on resold hardware, kickbacks from vendors, recommendations that drive future hours — none of it shows up as a line item, but all of it shows up in your year-end.
What predictable looks like
Flat per-device, per-mailbox, per-site pricing. Hardware quoted at cost plus a fixed margin. Project work scoped and approved before the invoice. The same number every month, with the variances on the brochure, not in your inbox.