Computer Service Contracts

Computer maintenance contracts are one area of your business where you may want to consider using a price-fixed model. Time and materials pricing is almost always going to be better for you, but many clients respond well to fixed price computer maintenance contracts.

So, if you insist on doing a price-fixed computer maintenance agreement, there are some items you must make sure you cover off. You want to protect yourself as much as possible and the only way to do that is to write up a good and tight computer maintenance agreement.

If you don't have tight provisions, the well-intentioned and even well-trained internal computer guru (the guy you set up as the go-to guy in your absence) will make mistakes. This guy will cause you to come out to do some computer maintenance on things you didn't bargain for. You don't want to be spending too much time fixing things that shouldn't have been broken in the first place.

Phone support is an area where many new IT consultants lose their shirts. They want to offer high quality service so they make phone support part of their service contract. The problem is they end up giving away the phone support for free.

When you are billing on a hourly rate, the hours you spend providing phone support need to be charged as well as on-site time. Let's face it, with phone support you're going to be contacted by phone, on your cell phone, by pages, by email etc... You're going to be doing phone support on a remote basis - and you can expect to do a lot of it.