How new IT managers get up to speed on budgets

In the early ’90s, Egon Rinderer would spend his mornings at a US Department of Agriculture facility in Central Illinois as a statistical analysis programmer, running crop projections, and his afternoons as the lab’s one and only IT guy.

From there, he continued his career at a new company managing a small desktop support team, where he suddenly had to become familiar with a budget—a simple one mostly involving salary reviews and raises, but a new responsibility nonetheless. His budgeting duties grew with his career; a later role saw him overseeing a bigger IT spending plan that included staff payments, as well as tools, software, and outside vendor services.

That kind of transition can be tough for an IT pro not used to speaking with executives who are always thinking about the bottom line.

“[Executives] don’t care about lines of code committed per week,” Rinderer, now SVP of public sector and global enterprise at IT operations platform NinjaOne, said. “They care about, how does this tie to revenue? And you’ve got to learn how to speak that language, and that’s a pretty steep learning curve for most people.”

We spoke with Rinderer and other tech pros who’ve climbed the learning curve and learned to think in terms of both technology and ROI.

Budgeting 101. Patrick Brown, CTO of vehicle intelligence infrastructure YASSI, had much to learn about finance and budgets in an executive role, following his many years as a software engineer at various companies.

“You could probably just go look up ‘financial acronyms,’ and I think that entire list is what I didn’t know,” Brown said.

In his first proposed budget, he set a “wide estimate” of necessary infrastructure to do business: capital expenditures like laptops and hardware, along with the cloud expenses. Setting IT expectations, Brown warned, might also mean adding in less obvious, extra costs that guarantee resiliency, including privacy measures, data warehousing, and backups.

However, not all organizations are willing to part with the funds for an evolving tech stack. A report from Spiceworks and Aberdeen Research found that 55% of surveyed companies in North America and Europe planned to increase their IT budgets in 2026—a decrease from 62% in 2025.

AI is also adding cost pressures to organizations’ bottom lines, with just under half (47%) exceeding their spending estimates for the technology, according to a recent study from tech advisory Futurum.

But given organizations’ determination to integrate AI into as many workflows as possible, a budget-minded manager may need to understand AI-related cost considerations, Brown noted. For example, they may need to have a discussion with their CFO about the rising cost of dedicated machines for training AI models.

“Give them realistic expectations that you are unlikely to exceed unless you are taking on additional customers and revenue than what those expectations set out,” Brown said. “Because it’s really hard for a business, especially early on, to plan to have that current budget, and then sort of have the rug pulled out from under them.”

Do mean to brag. Working in an industry constantly labeled a “cost center,” Rinderer frequently has his team members build a brag sheet: a display of IT wins that builds credibility for the next year’s budget request. It could be something as simple as, “the team built X and X resulted in Y dollars.”

“Those brag sheets are what I use to build my deck,” he told IT Brew. “I’m building it into the basis for my budget ask.”

To narrow down needs, Rinderer recommended that budget items demonstrate a benefit to a whole customer base, come with predetermined success metrics, and can be supported easily. IT leaders can conduct a periodic audit to understand the work that’s taking up the majority of a team’s time, along with what infrastructure pieces or tooling can be added (or eliminated) to help.

“There has to be a shared consciousness on that. The team generally knows what’s needed. If they’re not telling you, there’s a different problem that exists there,” he said.

Let’s negotiate. The budgeting job requires another skill for IT pros, according to Rinderer: selling the IT team’s work in a way that a CFO can appreciate. For Rinderer, sharpening that skill meant connecting with sales leaders and reading books on interpersonal communication and psychology.

Brown, too, noted the importance of communicating with IT team members—and making sure their ideas are heard—while fostering those ideas for leadership that could potentially earn revenue.

“My advice would be to explore their ideas with them. Never dismiss them outright, even if it isn’t immediately obvious that it’s in the budget. I think that demoralizes teams…It discourages them from bringing those up to you,” he said.

To get up to speed, Brown found mentors—the company’s CEO and CFO, for example—and wasn’t afraid to ask them questions, even if he didn’t know an acronym.

“If you can establish the relationships with your coworkers, such that you feel like you’re open and honest, especially in areas where you are ignorant of topics,” Brown said. “I think that it goes a long way.”