The Hidden Costs of Poor IT Asset Management (And How To Eliminate Them)

Hidden IT costs can quickly drain your budget and disrupt your operations. You may suspect you’re overspending but lack the visibility needed to pinpoint all the inefficiencies and unnecessary expenses in your IT asset management processes.

Surprise costs only make the issue worse. Whenever you have an unexpected compliance penalty or last-minute repair, you’re forced to extend further into your IT budget.

However, these IT costs aren’t inevitable. The right approach can help you uncover hidden expenses and make IT spending more predictable and efficient, allowing you to improve your bottom line.

Let’s explore the impact of bad IT asset management on businesses and how to eliminate unnecessary costs with the support of a solution like Deel IT.

The hidden costs of poor IT asset management

The first step to getting your IT budget under control is identifying the causes of all the unnecessary expenditures. Here are the most common reasons:

Untracked and missing physical assets

Poor management is a common cause of wasted spending. Companies buy equipment for new hires without realizing they have serviceable laptops hidden in storage or scattered across various locations and departments.

As technology becomes obsolete within years, employees may be unable to use laptops and computers when you finally uncover them. The devices are unlikely to be capable of running the latest applications they need for their jobs.

The same applies to software assets. SaaS accounts and Cloud services may continue to renew even if nobody is using them. While your subscriptions may be as little as $5 per month, these costs add up over time and for large groups of employees.

Costly repairs and reactive maintenance

Waiting for equipment to fail increases your repair costs. Poorly maintained equipment tends to break down faster and experience more catastrophic issues.

If you don’t keep to a regular maintenance schedule, you’ll also have to deal with more urgent repairs. That means you’re more likely to have to pay premium rates for services to fix devices overnight so employees can complete important projects on time.

Ultimately, neglected IT assets have a shorter useable life span. You’re forced to buy new equipment at a faster rate and stretch your budget.

Software licensing disputes and penalties

85% of businesses admit they don’t fully comply with their software licensing agreements. These violations are often inadvertent, with teams accidentally going beyond the scope of the agreement or misinterpreting key terms and conditions.

However, running unlicensed software can lead to significant penalties and legal action. For example, a Kansas-based manufacturing company was recently ordered to pay over $70,000 in restitution and fines for piracy.

Even if vendors are lenient, they’re likely to revoke your access to the software until they’ve received the unpaid fees. This could leave your teams without critical tools and resources for days while you resolve the issue.

See also: Best IT Asset Management Software of 2025: Top 15 Picks

Productivity loss and employee downtime

Over a third of employees say insufficient and unreliable technology hampers their productivity. They might struggle to perform tasks with slow or outdated tools or spend hours waiting for their equipment to be repaired.

If there are persistent issues, individual workers may feel like you’re setting them up for failure. They become disengaged with their work and less motivated to perform their best.

Poor IT asset management can lead to widespread productivity issues in industries where equipment is critical to overall business performance. For example, tech startups must stick to tight deadlines to deliver products. They may find themselves falling behind competitors if they keep experiencing delays due to unexpected technical issues.

Security vulnerabilities and data breaches

A recent report discovered that only 45% of companies are making the necessary investments into their ITAM strategy to secure their system.

While cybersecurity software can neutralize most threats, it can’t eliminate every risk to your organization. Lost or unmonitored devices can still give outsiders access to your system. If a former employee donates an old work laptop to a friend, for example, they might be able to log into your accounts or see sensitive data saved in the hard drive.

Data breaches cost businesses an average of $4.88 million in 2024. This high cost is due to:

• The extra labor needed to fix and resolve the issue
• Stolen, damaged, or lost assets
• Ransomware payments
• System downtime resulting in lost productivity
• Penalties for violating laws like the GDPR and CCPA
• Legal and IT consultancy fees

The financial fallout often extends beyond these direct costs. Businesses may find they lost trust with employees and customers, leading to higher levels of turnover.

Manual processes and administrative burden

Research shows IT teams lose 29% of their working week to manual processes. Instead of spending time on high-impact projects, they spend hours manually updating spreadsheets or coordinating with various departments.

Aside from the extra labor costs, manual processes leave you at greater risk of errors and delays. Team members are likely to make some mistakes like getting dates confused or adding the wrong decimal point to a figure. However, these mistakes often cost extra to resolve.

Suppose you send the wrong laptop to a remote worker, for example. You must continue to pay them even if they’re unable to perform any of their regular duties and arrange for premium delivery services to replace their equipment.

Ineffective lifecycle management

Poor lifecycle management leaves a lot of your purchasing decisions down to guesswork. Without a standardized system, team members don’t understand when to order new equipment or arrange for repairs.

If managers replace assets too soon, you’ll waste money on avoidable purchases. For example, managers might request a new laptop for an employee based on arbitrary reasons or to be generous. Meanwhile, the old laptop might be completely serviceable.

Alternatively, you might experience the opposite problem. Teams hold onto outdated hardware, which becomes expensive to maintain and cumbersome to operate. This may mean you have fewer upfront costs but it drives up your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

See also: Not Upgraded Your Workers’ Devices in Years? Here's Why You Should and How to Get Started

6 ways to eliminate hidden IT costs

Once you’ve identified the underlying causes of budget leaks, you can develop strategies for improving IT asset management processes and reduce unnecessary spending.

Here are some effective strategies we’ve seen across different companies:

Automate the onboarding process

IT and HR teams can spend hours coordinating with new hires. Free them up to focus on other tasks by using self-service features to automate most of the onboarding process.

Here’s what the process looks like when you manage it through Deel:

• New hires receive a welcome email with a link to a pre-approved catalog
• They choose the equipment they need for their role
• If they forget, Deel prompts them and alerts you
• Deel orders the equipment from local suppliers
• New hires receive another email with the delivery details

Creating the pre-approved catalog is simple. You can assign employees to groups based on their location, department, or a combination of the two. Deel IT then walks you through a simple set of filters so you can set the maximum budget, decide which peripherals to include, and say whether you’d like approval.

Track assets throughout the IT lifecycle

Never lose sight of IT assets after onboarding. Create an inventory database and continually update it as equipment changes hands or gets moved into storage.

Keeping better track means you’re less likely to order new equipment when you already have some available. You can refer to your database when equipping new hires or replacing old tech.

Deel IT can help you automatically maintain this database. As you order and recover equipment, our system updates the details for each worker. You get full visibility into each asset’s current location, condition, and user history.

Manage updates and maintenance from afar

Take responsibility for looking after equipment away from employees. While they may have the best of intentions, they might not have the expertise to recognize issues or manage upkeep.

Start by checking the condition of equipment at regular intervals. If you proactively manage equipment, you’re more likely to catch issues before they escalate into bigger problems and drive up your maintenance costs.

The obstacle is checking equipment when teams may be scattered across various locations and working remotely. You might miss software licensing issues or security vulnerabilities.

Use zero-touch deployment through global services like Deel to pre-load devices with apps and security protocols before you deliver them to employees. This ensures they have the optimal setup from the start for each asset. Whenever platforms release a new version of their software, you can schedule updates during convenient hours for your teams.

Deel IT also helps monitor device health by tracking parameters like battery life, storage, and network connectivity. If you notice issues, you can reach out to the employee about preventative maintenance or repairs.

Outsource IT maintenance and support

Resolving technical issues and arranging repairs for a global team can overextend your IT department. They may be limited to a single location but they still have to potentially assist employees across dozens of locations and time zones.

Leave all maintenance and support to a third-party service like Deel. Our team can take care of:

• Basic IT queries
• End-user technical issues
• Account provisioning and deprovisioning
• Maintenance and repair requests

Deel IT is available 24/7 so employees can access help regardless of where they’re based. Your IT department doesn’t have to have somebody on call at all times but nobody experiences any unnecessary downtime either.

See also: Outsourced IT Support: When Is It The Right Move For Your Business?

Save costs with refurbished devices

Buying refurbished hardware could save your company up to 71% of its IT budget. However, be careful to use reputable vendors to avoid sacrificing performance for costs.

Deel IT offers refurbished devices as part of our catalog. You can choose equipment from across different categories, confident that it’ll meet high standards and look almost brand new. As part of the service, Deel also wipes each device and returns it to its factory settings before pre-configuring any apps you need.

If you want to transfer devices within your own company, Deel IT supports this too. You can arrange to have the equipment refurbished when one employee leaves before you hand it over to their replacement.

Standardize offboarding

Establish a clear protocol for collecting equipment and erasing the data when employees leave the company. This minimizes the risk of devices getting lost or misplaced, leading to potentially costly compliance issues.

As retrieving devices across locations can be challenging, Deel IT can handle this for you. Our local teams arrange to collect the device and wipe the data. Afterward, we can either transfer the equipment to another worker, put it in storage, or buy it back from you.

Consolidate your vendor network

Coordinating with local vendors can steal just as much time as managing new hires. If you’re sending equipment to international teams, you also have to account for language barriers and different regulatory hurdles.

Use a single global service to simplify the process. Leading vendors like Deel IT can arrange delivery worldwide within three to five days so teams don’t have to spend so long on logistics. If you prefer to maintain a degree of oversight, you can still track all these shipments via our centralized dashboard.

Our customer, Sastrify, solved its equipment challenges with Deel IT. We helped them deliver assets to over 130 team members across 24 countries with 97% on-time delivery.

Simplify your IT asset management with Deel IT

Without a structured approach, your business has little hope of gaining control over its IT spending. Hidden costs will continue to drain your budget unnoticed and cause operational disruption and compliance risks.

Leading global solutions like Deel IT can give you back financial control. Our range of services and features are designed to streamline IT asset management across time zones and locations to eliminate unnecessary waste.

Deel IT offers international teams:

• Global coverage (130+ countries)
• A preapproved catalog with a wide selection of IT equipment
• Outsourced deployment and recovery
• Delivery in 3 to 5 days
• Automated workflows
• Remote software management and updates
• Compliance support
• 24/7 troubleshooting
• Expert local maintenance and repairs

Concerned about your IT spending? Book a consultation with Deel now to see how we can help you identify the causes and bring costs down.