ACT360 prices managed IT for small businesses per user per month under one agreement. The fee covers help desk support, monitoring, patching, security tools, backup management and planning. Microsoft licences, accounting software subscriptions, new hardware and projects are billed separately.

Per-user pricing suits a small team because it follows the number an owner already plans around, which is headcount. The bookkeeper with a desktop at the office and a laptop at home counts once, not twice. When you hire someone, the bill moves by one user, and you can see that coming.

There are a lot of small businesses doing this math. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada counts 410,154 small employer businesses in Ontario (1 to 99 employees, December 2024), and small businesses make up 98.2% of employer businesses in Canada. Most of them don’t have an IT department. They have someone who is “good with computers.”

Headcount sets the base. Whether you still run a server in the back room, how much hands-on work your office needs, the software your business depends on, how many locations you have and the state your setup is in today decide where in the range you land.

• A server in the back room. An on-site server running shared files or accounting needs patching, backups and eventually a replacement plan. A team that works fully in Microsoft 365 has less to look after.
• Site visits. Printers, Wi-Fi, desk phones and new computer setup all need someone in the room sooner or later. Remote-only pricing assumes that rarely happens.
• Line-of-business software. QuickBooks, Xero, Sage or an industry program that only 2 people know how to fix adds support work, especially when the vendor needs chasing.
• Home and hybrid work. Staff working from home need secure access to the same files and a laptop that gets updated even when it never visits the office.
• More than one location. A second office or a warehouse adds network equipment and one more place for things to drift out of step.
• The starting point. No admin passwords on file, 6 different laptop models and a backup nobody has tested all take onboarding work before monthly support settles down.

The last one is the one owners underestimate. Two businesses with the same headcount can land at opposite ends of the range because one has kept things documented and the other has not.

Usually more than a year of the fee difference people argue about. Multiply the people who can’t work by their loaded hourly cost and the hours lost, then add the invoices that go out late and the customers who wait. That number is what support protects.

Here’s an illustration with round numbers, so swap in your own. If 10 people at a loaded cost of $40 an hour lose a full 8-hour day because the server won’t start, that’s $3,200 in wages paid for no work, before anyone counts the late invoices. In a small office, the person who would normally fix it is often also the person who can’t do their real job while they try.

Small isn’t a shield. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security’s National Cyber Threat Assessment 2025-2026 assesses that ransomware actors are almost certainly opportunistic and don’t target specific industries, and Statistics Canada reports that about 1 in 6 Canadian businesses (16%) were impacted by a cyber security incident in 2023. Our business continuity and disaster recovery page covers how backups get built and tested so a bad day stays a bad day.

The fee should cover the routine work that keeps your computers, accounts and data running and secure, plus someone planning ahead with you. If a quote sits well below the ranges above, check which of these it leaves out.

• Help desk support from a named contact who knows your team and your software.
• Monitoring and patching for computers, any server and Microsoft 365, scheduled outside your busy hours.
• Endpoint detection and response on every managed device. ACT360 uses Huntress EDR, backed by a 24/7 threat operations team.
• Multi-factor authentication on every account, including the shared logins nobody likes to talk about.
• Support for the tools a small office runs on, such as Microsoft 365, QuickBooks, Xero, Sage and Dropbox Business.
• Backups that get test-restored, not only a report saying the job ran.
• New computer purchasing advice and setup, plus offboarding when someone leaves.
• Regular reviews that tie technology spending to where the business is going.

MFA earns its place on that list. Microsoft reports that MFA plus blocking legacy sign-ins stops more than 99.9% of common identity attacks, and the Cyber Centre’s baseline controls for small and medium organizations list the rest of the basics. Our breakdown of what managed IT actually includes goes line by line.

Microsoft 365 licences, accounting and other software subscriptions, new hardware, larger projects and cyber insurance usually sit outside the managed IT fee. Budget for them separately so the monthly number stays easy to compare between quotes.

• Microsoft 365 licences, billed per user.
• QuickBooks, Xero, Sage and industry software, billed by each vendor.
• Laptops, desktops, printers, servers and network equipment as they reach end of life.
• Projects such as retiring the office server, moving files to the cloud or setting up a new location.
• Cyber insurance, which increasingly asks about controls your IT provider manages.

Projects are where the wrong advice costs the most. In that painting contractor case, the previous provider quoted $60,000 to replace a failing server. ACT360 asked what was coming next, learned the company planned to move its accounting off-premise, and delivered a server sized to bridge to that move for $25,000 including installation and migration. Before you buy, ask what the next 2 to 3 years look like, not only what’s broken today.

Time licence purchases with care when you add staff. Under Microsoft’s New Commerce Experience policy, most subscriptions can only be cancelled for a prorated refund within 7 days of purchase, so a licence bought for a short-term hire can outlast the job.

Compare scope first and price second. Two quotes at the same per-user rate can cover very different work, so hold both against the same short list.

1. Who is our contact? A named person, or whoever picks up.
2. Are site visits included? If not, what does one cost?
3. Is our accounting software supported? Or only “best effort.”
4. How are backups proven? A scheduled test restore, or a green checkmark.
5. Who holds the admin passwords? It should be the business, not the provider.
6. What does leaving cost? Notice periods, early-termination fees and handover terms.

Some providers discount longer terms. ACT360’s published rate doesn’t change with term length, and every Managed IT agreement includes a 90-day exit clause. Our page on managed IT with no long-term contract explains how it works, and our guide to what’s included in an IT support contract covers the fine print. If you already have a provider and wonder whether you’ve outgrown them, read why small businesses outgrow their first IT provider.