January is when a lot of accounting firms bring on extra help for tax season. The offer goes out, the start date is set, and then someone asks what the new person is going to work on.
New hire IT costs are easy to miss because they never show up on the offer letter. They land in five places, and every one of them can be priced before the start date.
The computer is the cost everyone remembers
Most owners remember to budget for a computer. Picking the right one takes more thought. A preparer working two monitors all day needs a different setup than someone who mostly works from a phone, and engineering or design software can need far more graphics power than a standard laptop.
Where the person works matters too. Say your new hire lives in Spring Hill and plans to work from home two days a week. That's a laptop and a dock instead of a desktop, a second set of monitors at home, and a home network you don't control. If that sounds familiar, we've covered work-from-home setups for CPAs.
Set a standard kit for each role before you post the job. The order goes in once, and the gear is ready before the person is.
Software adds up one seat at a time
Software is the most predictable line in an IT budget, which is why it gets ignored. Each new person usually means another Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace seat, plus seats in the tax or accounting software, the client portal, e-signature, the password manager, and the security tools that cover every user.
Together they're a real monthly number, and some vendors only sell annual terms or seat bundles. Write down every per-user charge your current staff carries. That list is what one more hire costs in software, and it belongs next to salary when you decide to hire.
Logins, door access and day-one security
Getting access wrong costs more than a slow first week. Set these up before the start date.
- Accounts. Their own login for email and each app, multi-factor authentication turned on, and a password manager instead of a sticky note. Give the role what it needs and nothing extra.
- The door. Their own keycard or fob, so nobody is lending a badge or propping the back door.
- Training. A short security session in week one, before the first fake invoice reaches their inbox.
Shared logins are the habit to break. If two preparers share one account in the tax software, you can't tell who changed a return, and you can't cut off one without locking out the other.
Setup time costs money even when it's already paid for
Someone has to order the laptop, set it up, create the accounts, and sit with the new person on day one. If that's your IT provider, it's billed hourly or it uses time in your agreement. If it's your office manager, those are hours they aren't spending on their own job.
Three hires starting the same January week, right as the firm gets busy, can pull your IT help off everything else. Send start dates to whoever handles your IT as soon as offers are accepted, so setup gets its own time on the calendar.
Know which hire pushes the network over
One new person won't strain your network. The fifteenth since the last upgrade might. Office Wi-Fi, the internet connection, file storage, the firewall, even the number of network ports at the desks all have a ceiling, and growth reaches it one hire at a time.
Ask your IT provider where those ceilings are today. If the office is comfortable at 25 people and you're at 21, you can budget the next upgrade now, before hire number 26 is waiting on a desk that won't connect.
Put new hire IT costs on the hiring checklist
When leadership talks about adding people, the IT cost should sit on the same page as salary and benefits. That means the kit, the software seats, the setup time, and how close you are to the next upgrade. Planning that with clients is part of complete IT management at Net Works.
Hiring in the next few months? Call Net Works at 615-249-1131. In ten minutes we'll price what one new hire costs your office in equipment, software and setup, so the number is ready before the offer goes out.
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