Technology in a small business tends to accumulate rather than be designed. Something is bought to solve a problem, then something else and five years later there are nineteen subscriptions and nobody can say what three of them do.
Here is what a coherent stack looks like for a UK business of ten to thirty people, in the order worth building it, with realistic 2026 costs.
Layer 1: productivity and email
Microsoft 365 for most UK businesses. Email, files, Teams, the Office applications, and — importantly — the security and device management layer that clients increasingly ask about.
Mix the plans rather than putting everybody on the same one: Business Premium for people handling client data, Business Standard for general office staff, Business Basic for field and part-time staff. The comparison is in this article.
The alternative: Google Workspace, which is genuinely capable and slightly cheaper. Pick one and commit — running half of each costs real money in duplicated licences and produces two places where files live.
Cost: £1,500 to £5,000 a year for twenty people, depending on the mix.
Layer 2: security and identity
Not a separate purchase for most businesses. It is Business Premium, configured — and in the majority of tenancies we look at, it is present and switched off.
Multi-factor authentication everywhere, conditional access, device management through Intune, Defender for endpoints and mail. What is in there and what turning it on involves is in this article.
Add a business password manager, which is the only realistic way to have unique credentials everywhere and to revoke shared access when somebody leaves.
Cost: included in the plan, plus £600 to £1,000 a year for the password manager, plus the configuration work.
Layer 3: backup
The layer most commonly missing, because businesses assume it is included. It is not — Microsoft's shared responsibility model puts your data on you, as set out in how to back up Microsoft 365.
Cover all four workloads — mail, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams — plus any servers, with at least one immutable copy. And test a restore quarterly, because an untested backup is a hypothesis.
Cost: £600 to £1,500 a year for twenty people.
Layer 4: the website
Not a brochure. Something that is found for what you do, answers the questions that block enquiries and captures them into a system rather than an inbox. The six jobs are in this article.
Hosting matters more than comparison tables suggest, and ownership of the domain and hosting account matters most of all.
Cost: £4,000 to £12,000 to build, then £500 to £1,500 a year for hosting and maintenance.
Layer 5: customer records
Somewhere every conversation, the current status and the next action live — visible to everybody rather than distributed across inboxes.
Choose for whether records will still be accurate in a year rather than for the feature list, and connect it to email so it maintains itself. The selection questions are in choosing a CRM.
Cost: £2,000 to £8,000 a year for twenty users including implementation in year one.
Layer 6: finance
Xero, QuickBooks or Sage. All three are competent, all three are Making Tax Digital compliant and the right one is usually whichever your accountant works in fastest.
Turn on the invoice reminders. Most businesses do not, and it is the single cheapest improvement to cash flow available — the sequence is in automating invoice chasing.
Cost: £400 to £1,200 a year.
Layer 7: automation
Last, deliberately. Automation on unreliable foundations produces sophisticated processes on top of something that keeps falling over.
Once the layers below are stable, connect them: enquiries into the CRM, invoices into finance, documents filed automatically, reporting assembled without a person. The method is in where to start.
Cost: £2,000 to £6,000 for the first few, then a few hundred a year to run.
What it adds up to
For a twenty-person UK business, roughly £20,000 to £35,000 a year all in, including support and device replacement amortised across a three to four year cycle. That is £85 to £145 per person per month.
Set against a fully loaded staff cost of around £2,500 to £4,000 per person per month, it is a small proportion — and it is the proportion that determines whether the rest of the money is spent productively.
The businesses that spend badly are not the ones that spend too little. They are the ones that spend at layer seven while layer three is missing.
The order matters more than the products
Every layer depends on the ones below it. AI on top of a disorganised file estate produces confident wrong answers. A CRM that nobody updates is worse than a spreadsheet. Automation on unreliable systems fails in ways that are hard to diagnose.
Build upwards, finish each layer before starting the next and accept that this is two to three years of steady work rather than a project.
If you would like an honest assessment of which layers your business has and which are missing, that is what our IT consultancy team does — and we will tell you where you are already fine. Get in touch.
