Managed IT support, priced per user

Managed IT support means outsourcing the day-to-day running of your technology to a specialist team, under a single contract with clearly agreed service levels. Instead of waiting for something to break, your systems are proactively monitored, patched and maintained continuously — and when your people need help, they speak directly to an engineer who already knows your setup.

At Yorkshire Business Systems, one contract covers everything from a user's frozen spreadsheet to your core server infrastructure. One number to call, one team accountable, one predictable annual price — no opaque bundles, no hidden extras, no call queues. For most small and mid-sized businesses, it's the whole skill set on tap for a fraction of a single in-house salary, with no recruitment, training or holiday cover to worry about.

The short answer — yes. Most small and medium businesses we work with didn't set out looking for an IT partner. They arrived at one the hard way — after a server died on a Friday afternoon with no backup, or a member of staff clicked a link that locked the file server, or the person who "knew the IT" handed in their notice and nobody could find the admin passwords. By the time those moments happen, the cost of scrambling for help is several multiples of what steady, contracted cover would have cost in the first place.

The trouble for an SME is that the technology surface area — the laptops, the tenancy, the firewall, the line-of-business apps, the backups — looks identical to a large company's, but there is rarely a dedicated person watching it. Things drift: updates get postponed because nobody wants to reboot the accounts machine, licences pile up after a leaver, antivirus quietly lapses. None of it is a crisis on its own. Together they form the slow background conditions that turn a routine Tuesday into a full-blown incident.

Managed support exists to put a pair of eyes on that drift before it bites. You're not buying someone to fix what's already broken — you're buying the steady maintenance, the someone-who- notices, and the recovery plan that's already written and tested. The annual cost is known in advance; the helpdesk number doesn't change; and the person on the other end already knows your site, your kit and your people.

Our managed IT support is priced per user, per year — from £95 per user, per year, with contracts starting at five users. Pricing per user rather than per incident means the cost of support is known in advance and doesn't spike in the month something goes wrong, and it scales cleanly as you take people on.

The per-user fee covers the unlimited remote helpdesk, proactive monitoring, patching and maintenance. Infrastructure is priced separately because it isn't tied to headcount: server support is charged per server, hardware maintenance cover per device, and Microsoft 365, SharePoint and Azure tenancy care as a single annual line. Software licensing, antivirus and other third-party subscriptions are billed on top at cost.

A five-user Yorkshire business on general IT support alone therefore starts at £475 per year. Add the cover you actually need — devices, servers, cloud, security — in our quote builder and you'll get an indicative annual range in seconds, then a fully itemised quote from an engineer.

Switching IT providers is the part most businesses dread, and most of that dread comes from not knowing what the handover involves. We've refined our onboarding over twenty years to make it as dull an experience for you as possible — which is exactly what you want from it. It begins with an audit: an engineer walks through your existing estate and documents it, so the person who picks up the phone on day one already has the context they need.

We then bring monitoring and patching online in a controlled way, confirm your backup is sound and actually restorable, and agree the service levels that suit your business. Your outgoing provider is treated professionally and we work to their handover schedule — no big-bang cutover unless you want one. Most clients are fully onboarded within a couple of weeks, several within days, and your users should notice only that things work a little more smoothly than before.

A support contract that doesn't account for backup isn't really a support contract — it's a helpdesk with a blind spot. We make sure your critical data is captured regularly and automatically, and held somewhere it can be recovered from quickly when it's needed.

But a backup is only as good as the restore behind it, which is why we test. A backup that has been silently failing for six months is worse than no backup at all. Our monitoring watches for failed jobs and we run periodic restore checks, so that when the day comes — a ransomware event, a failed update, a hardware death — the recovery actually works and the business keeps running.