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IT support for small businesses: what it actually covers
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IT support for small businesses: what it actually covers

19 September 2026·7 min

What an IT support contract covers, what tends to sit outside the small print, and how to tell whether it beats only calling someone when something breaks.

Most small businesses run their IT the same way: when something breaks, they call someone. It works until the invoicing server refuses to start on the 30th of the month, or a fake invoice slips past the spam filter and somebody pays it.

IT support contracts are the alternative to that model. But they get signed blind very often, because every quote looks alike and none of them mean the same thing. This article is about what to look at.

What a normal contract covers

Decent IT support covers three things, and they should be written separately:

  • Incident response. What people mean by support: something breaks, someone fixes it. What matters here is not that it exists but how fast. A contract with no committed response time commits to nothing.
  • Preventive work. Updates, verified backups, disk and antivirus checks, tracking which machines are ageing out. It is the part nobody notices and the only one that prevents emergencies.
  • Management. Knowing what machines exist, under what licences, who has access to what, and when things need renewing. It sounds bureaucratic until someone leaves the company and nobody knows what they had access to.

    • If a quote only details the first point, it is not support: it is a block of hours under another name.

    What is almost never included

    This is where surprise invoices come from. The usual exclusions — most of them reasonable, but you need to know them:

  • Hardware. If a disk dies, the contract covers replacing it; you pay for the disk.
  • Licences. Microsoft 365, antivirus, your management software. They get managed, not given away.
  • Projects. Fitting out a new office, migrating email or replacing every machine is not maintenance, it is a separate project.
  • Third-party software. If your accounting package fails because of its own bug, the vendor fixes it. What your provider should do is handle that ticket for you instead of leaving you on hold.
  • Out-of-hours emergencies, unless the contract says otherwise.

    • What it costs and why quotes differ so much

    There are three ways to charge for it, and they explain most of the gap between quotes:

  • By the hour, no contract. Cheap when nothing happens, brutal the month something does. And the provider has no incentive to prevent anything.
  • Blocks of hours. You buy a package and it runs down. Better hourly rate, but it still rewards fixing over preventing.
  • Flat fee per seat. Monthly, per machine or per user, everything above included. It is the only model where the provider wants nothing to break, because every incident costs them money.

    • A flat fee costs more in quiet months. That is exactly the point: you are paying so the bad months never happen.

    How to tell if it pays off

    Quick maths: add up what you spent last year on IT callouts, then add the hours your staff spent idle waiting for something to work again. Almost nobody counts that second part, and it is usually the bigger one.

    If the total approaches what a contract would cost, the contract wins — because you also get the preventive work and stop carrying the problem in your head.

    Two cases pay off without doing the maths: when you handle client data (which includes any law firm, clinic or accountancy, because of GDPR), and when nobody inside knows where the backups are.

    Four questions before signing

    These separate a real service from a brochure:

  • How fast do you respond, and what happens if you miss it? With no written consequence, it is not a commitment.
  • Are backups ever restored to check them? A backup that has never been restored is not a backup, it is a folder.
  • What happens to my data and my access if I leave? The right answer is that they hand it over. If the answer is vague, the vagueness is the product.
  • Who will I be dealing with — the same person every time? In a small company, someone who knows your setup is worth more than any certification.

    • Where we work

    At Codelvia we provide IT support to small businesses, professional practices and clinics, charged per seat with no lock-in. We cover the whole Madrid region on site, and we have pages with the detail for each area: Madrid city, Pozuelo de Alarcón, Alcobendas and Las Rozas. If your town is not on the list, it does not matter: we still come.

    If you are on the call-when-it-breaks model and want a second opinion on whether a contract is worth it, get in touch and we will tell you straight, even if the answer is that you do not need one.

    Have a project in mind?

    Tell us what you want to achieve.

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