What your Apple fleet costs to run

Pick one period and decide which devices count. Every option you compare later has to use the same period and the same devices. For each device, write down what you paid for it or what the lease costs, plus accessories, repairs and what you expect to get when you sell it. Keep the one-time work of rolling devices out separate from the cost of running them.

Take the figures from real invoices and service records where you have them. Where you don't, estimate, and write down what each estimate is based on. When the real number comes in, you can swap it in and see whether your assumption held.

Count the hours your own team spends on enrolment, packaging apps, updates, helpdesk questions and retiring old devices. Then add the jobs that come up once or twice a year and are easy to forget: renewing certificates, managing accounts, and pulling together evidence when an auditor asks for it.

Record the internal hours and price them at one hourly rate, the same for every option. How much support a fleet needs depends on its apps, its users and the hours you cover. Your own records say more about that than a fixed ratio of IT staff to devices, so use them wherever you have them.

When you look at an external service, find out what the regular fee covers. Ask which devices they support, how quickly they respond and how that is agreed, whether licences are included, and whether project work is part of the fee or billed separately. Then list the work your own team will still do. Those hours stay on your side of the comparison.

Axtero Managed IT charges a fixed monthly fee for the work we agree with you. Ask us for a current offer and put it next to what the same work costs you in-house today.

Find out how quickly a broken device can be replaced and set up again with the person's data and apps. That takes spare devices, access to backups and someone to step in when the usual person is away. All three cost money, so put them in the budget. Keep downtime that has happened, with the hours it cost, apart from estimates of what an outage might cost one day.

You need a plan for this either way. An external provider still needs a recovery process you have agreed on. If you manage devices in-house, someone has to cover when your administrator is on holiday or off sick.

Compare the totals, and look hard at the assumptions behind them. Then see what happens when you keep devices longer, when support requests go up, or when the company grows. A small change in one assumption can matter more than the difference in licence prices.

You don't have to hand over everything. You can keep the work in-house and buy help for one clearly defined part of it. Whatever you choose, write into the agreement who does what, who has which access, what reports you get, and how the provider helps you move on if you ever switch.