Maciej Ramus
An IT budget in a manufacturing company is usually drawn up in December, and usually the same way: we take this year's spending, add 10% for licence price rises and leave a little “for something new”. A budget like that is easy to approve but hard to defend. A year later nobody can say what the money spent on systems delivered, and the list of things “to do someday” is longer than it was a year earlier.
Below we show how to put together an IT budget for 2027 so that every item has a reason. We write as a company that builds configurators, quoting systems, CRM and machine monitoring for manufacturers, so we see which expenses pay back and which remain just a cost. At the end there is a questionnaire: you answer a few questions about your company and the system suggests how much to spend and on what.
Before you divide the money: list what you already pay for
The first step costs nothing and often frees up part of the budget. Go through the invoices from the last 12 months and put every subscription, licence, hosting plan, service contract and external contractor into one table. For each item, write down four things:
- how much it costs per year, including items hidden on company cards,
- who actually uses it and how many active accounts it has,
- who is responsible for it, meaning who will decide whether to cancel it,
- when the contract ends and how long the notice period is.
In almost every company we do this review with, three things come up: accounts of employees who left long ago, two tools doing the same job (e.g. two quoting programs or two cloud drives) and a system bought for a project that ended a year ago. That is money you can move to development without asking the board for more.
Three IT budget baskets
The simplest split you can defend in front of the board is three baskets. Each has a different control question:
- Maintenance and obligations. Hardware, licences, hosting, servicing, changes required by law. Question: will the company stop if we don't pay for this?
- Security. Backups, two-factor authentication, updates, staff training. Question: how much does a day without systems, or a leak of customer data, cost us?
- Development. Projects that shorten work or bring in sales: quoting, CRM, integrations, production data, AI. Question: after how many months will it pay back?
As a starting point for discussion at manufacturers, we suggest roughly this split: 50-60% for maintenance, 10-15% for security and 25-40% for development. This is not an industry standard, just our observation from implementations. If development gets less than a quarter, the company is mainly paying to keep things as they are.
What to spend on in 2027: 7 items that hold up
1. KSeF finished properly, not just “working”
Most companies joined KSeF (Poland's national e-invoicing system) in 2026, but often in emergency mode: invoices are issued by the accounting software, while the rest of the process still relies on retyping. On 1 January 2027 the transition period ends. Penalties for invoices issued outside the system come into force, and even the smallest companies that were exempt must move to KSeF. This is a good moment to connect the quote, order, ERP and invoice into one flow without copying data by hand. It is usually a small integration project, and it pays back the fastest of all.
2. Backups, two-factor authentication and old computers
This is not a “development” item, but without it the rest makes no sense. Check three things: whether a backup was test-restored this year (a backup alone is not enough), whether email and systems holding customer data use two-factor authentication, and how many computers in the office and on the shop floor still run Windows 10. Free support for that system ended in October 2025, and the paid extension for businesses gets more expensive every year. It is better to plan the replacement in the budget than to pay for it in a rush. If you already use AI tools, add to this basket the data-handling rules we described in our article on AI security in the company.
3. Quoting and a configurator where a quote takes days
If preparing a quote takes a salesperson or process engineer an hour or more, and meanwhile the customer is also asking your competitors, that is the best-paid problem in the company. A configurator or quoting system cuts pricing from days to minutes and reduces pricing errors. Realistic ranges are PLN 35-60k for a simple configurator and PLN 87-150k for an advanced one; we set out the details in our article how much a configurator costs. If you don't know where to start, first calculate what your current process costs you, using the formula from the article on the cost of quote automation.
4. CRM with a sales pipeline, if the sales forecast comes from gut feeling
The 2027 budget rests on a sales forecast. If that forecast is the sum of salespeople's hunches, the whole plan is built on guesswork. A CRM with properly defined pipeline stages lets you calculate the forecast from data, not from mood. A word of caution: a CRM without a defined process and without someone looking after it ends up the way we described in our article why CRM implementations fail. So budget not only for licences, but also for time to set up the process.
5. Production data: a pilot on one line
Many companies plan “digitalising production” as one big project for the whole plant. It is more sensible to start with one machine or line that is the bottleneck and measure its OEE from data, not from paper. After three months you know where the hours are really being lost, and you have figures for deciding whether to expand. The same pilot is also the first step towards predictive maintenance.
6. Integrations instead of more tools
A typical picture: CRM, a quoting program, ERP, an online shop, an Excel price list and an Excel supplier database. Each tool works on its own, but people retype data between them several times a day. Before you buy a sixth tool, check whether connecting these five would give you more. We compared the cost of several tools versus one system using the example of Pipedrive, PandaDoc and Asana, and the point at which Excel stops being enough in our article on the supplier database.
7. AI in one specific process
An “AI” line in the budget with no process assigned to it is the most common way to spend money with no result. Pick one task that takes up a lot of people's time today and has clear input data: answering repetitive customer questions, searching technical documentation, drafting a quote. An assistant working on company documents (RAG) usually costs PLN 8-20k, an agent with access to the CRM PLN 25-45k plus PLN 700-1,400 per month. Full ranges are in our AI agent price list and in our article on the cost of AI implementation.
What not to spend on (or to hold off on)
- A licence “because the competition has one”. If you cannot name a person who will use the tool every day, and a process it will change, a year from now it will end up on the list from the first step.
- Replacing the whole ERP “in one go”. A major system change without a defined process is the most expensive project in the budget and the one most often postponed. Adding the missing piece to your current ERP (quoting, a customer portal, reports) and integrating it often delivers more.
- A generic chatbot on the website. Without a knowledge base about your products and without handing the conversation over to a salesperson, it gives vague answers and puts customers off. A smaller assistant based on your own documents is better.
- 3D or VR “for trade fairs”. A 3D model that is not connected to price and quote impresses once. The same budget spent on a 3D configurator with pricing works all year round. We wrote about this in our article on Three.js on your website.
- A new website just for looks. If your current website does not generate enquiries, a new look will not change that. First decide what the customer should do on the website (get a price, order a sample, book a call), and only then design.
- An in-house AI server without the volume. A model running in your own server room makes sense with a large number of queries or very sensitive data. With a few dozen questions a day, it is expensive hardware sitting idle. We described the criteria in our article on a private LLM in the company.
Questionnaire: how much to spend on IT in 2027 and on what
It is hard to say up front how many hours a configurator or CRM will win back. It is easy, however, to say how many quotes you prepare per month, how long one takes and how many salespeople you have. That is why we prepared a questionnaire: you answer questions about your company, and the system calculates how much you lose with your current way of working, selects the scope and cost of each project and suggests how much to allocate to investments in 2027.
Questionnaire: how much to spend on IT in 2027 and on what
Answer questions about your company (approx. 3 minutes). At the end you will get a list of projects with cost, payback and priority, plus a suggestion of how much to allocate to investments. We send nothing; everything is calculated in your browser.
Company and budget
Two figures that the rest of the calculation depends on.
Quoting
How a quote for a customer is prepared today.
Sales and customer contact
Where leads are kept and how much time goes on admin.
Orders, invoices and KSeF
How much data people retype by hand between programs.
Production
Downtime on the most important line or machine.
Customer questions and company knowledge
Repetitive questions are the best place for a first AI project.
Security
These things don't earn money, but without them the rest makes no sense.
How to read the result? “Mandatory” items are things not worth postponing, even if they don't earn money themselves: KSeF and security basics. “Now” means projects that pay back in less than a year, and “Stage 2” within two years. The suggested investment amount covers these three groups plus a 15% reserve. If you enter your budget, the questionnaire will show what fits within it and what needs to be split into stages or moved to 2028.
The questionnaire is deliberately cautious. For quoting, it counts time savings and a small increase in won quotes thanks to faster replies, but it does not take into account customers who today don't send an enquiry at all because they cannot check the price themselves. All assumptions are listed below the result, so you can present them to the board together with the figures.
Costs the budget usually forgets
- Maintenance after implementation. Every system needs fixes, updates and hosting. Allow approx. 12-20% of the implementation value per year.
- Your people's time. Someone has to describe the process, prepare the data, test and train the team. If that person also has a full-time job in production or sales, the project takes longer.
- Data clean-up. Price lists in several versions, a customer database with duplicates, product codes written in different ways. This is often 20-30% of the work in the first implementation.
- Per-user licences. Off-the-shelf tools are cheap with five accounts and expensive with fifty. Calculate the cost over three years for the headcount you plan, not the current one.
- Reserve. Scope almost always grows along the way. Leave 15-20% of the development budget unallocated, instead of moving money out of security later.
For larger projects, it is also worth agreeing with the contractor on a billing model that fits the annual budget. We compared fixed price, time and materials, hour packages and subscriptions in our article on ways to bill an IT project.
The 2027 plan quarter by quarter
| Quarter | What we do | Result at the end of the quarter |
|---|---|---|
| Q1 | List of subscriptions and cancellations, finishing KSeF and the ERP integration, backups and two-factor authentication, choosing one development project | Money freed up, peace of mind in accounting, scope of project no. 1 defined |
| Q2 | Implementing project no. 1 as an MVP (e.g. a configurator or CRM), a monitoring pilot on one machine | A working system on real data, first measurements |
| Q3 | Fixes after the first months, a second project (e.g. an AI assistant on documents), team training | Figures for a “before and after” comparison |
| Q4 | Review: what paid back and what didn't. A plan for 2028 based on data, not hunches | A 2028 budget you can defend in front of the board |
If you are planning a project above approx. PLN 100k, also check the calls for funding for digitalisation (national and regional programmes). The application has to be submitted before work starts, so it is worth deciding on a grant as early as Q1. We write more about how grants affect the numbers in our article on AI implementation costs and PARP grants.
Summary: spend or wait
| Spend in 2027 | Wait or don't spend |
|---|---|
| Integrating quotes, ERP and invoices for KSeF | Replacing the whole ERP without a defined process |
| Backup restore test, two-factor authentication, replacing Windows 10 computers | More licences without a person who will use them |
| A configurator or quoting system, if a quote takes days | 3D and VR not connected to price and quote |
| A CRM with a defined pipeline and a process owner | A new website just for looks |
| A data pilot on one production line | Digitalising the whole plant in one project |
| AI in one process with clear data | A generic chatbot and an in-house AI server without the volume |
Frequently asked questions
How much should a manufacturing company spend on IT?
There is no single right figure, because it depends on the industry, the scale and how many processes already run in systems. More important than the size of the budget is what share goes to development. As a starting point we suggest 50-60% for maintenance, 10-15% for security and 25-40% for projects that shorten work or increase sales.
Where should you start when planning the IT budget for 2027?
With a list of everything the company already pays for: subscriptions, licences, hosting and service contracts, together with the number of active users. This list almost always reveals unnecessary costs that can be moved to development. Only then is the budget divided into maintenance, security and development.
Does KSeF require additional budget in 2027?
Yes, if in 2026 the company implemented KSeF only on the accounting software side. On 1 January 2027 the transition period ends and penalties come into force, and even the smallest companies move to the system. It is worth budgeting for integrating the quote, order, ERP and invoice so that data is not retyped by hand.
Which IT project pays back fastest in a manufacturing company?
Usually the ones that eliminate retyping data by hand: integrating the ERP with quotes and invoices, and automating quoting. A configurator or quoting system also gives you a sales advantage, because the customer gets a price faster than from your competitors. You can check the right order for your company in the questionnaire in this article.
How much reserve should you leave in the IT budget?
For development projects it is worth leaving 15-20% unallocated, because scope almost always grows during implementation. Separately, you need to account for maintaining each new system, usually 12-20% of the implementation value per year.
Next step
If you are drawing up your 2027 budget and have several ideas but money for one or two, send us a short list. We will tell you which project we think will pay back fastest, what it really costs including maintenance, and how to split it into stages so that the first result is visible within the first half of the year. You will find examples of working systems in the JSON Crew showroom.
Write to us or read how to organise your processes so the 2027 plan doesn't stall at 90%.
Read also
- How much does a configurator cost? Realistic ranges and what affects the price
- The best CRM for a manufacturing company in 2026: a ranking of 29 tools
- How much does an AI agent cost for a business: a realistic 2026 price list
- OEE: what it is, how to calculate it and why the figure from paper lies
- Configurator, CPQ and supplier catalogue: quoting architecture in non-serial manufacturing
