Most businesses do some form of planning in November and December. Budgets are reviewed, targets are set, and priorities are agreed. Technology decisions often get made in this window — sometimes thoughtfully, sometimes reactively.
This checklist is designed to help you assess your technology position systematically, so you go into 2026 with a clear picture of what needs attention and in what order.
1. Audit What You’re Actually Paying For
Start with a simple spreadsheet: every software subscription your business pays for, the monthly or annual cost, and who uses it. Most businesses find at least a few surprises — tools from projects that ended, duplicate functionality across systems, or licences that were sized for a headcount you no longer have.
This exercise typically saves money and reveals the landscape you’re working with.
2. Identify Your Highest-Cost Manual Processes
Where is your team spending time on work that could be automated? Data entry between systems, manual report generation, repetitive administrative tasks — these have a real cost that rarely makes it onto a technology budget but should.
For each process, estimate the hours spent per week and multiply by the cost of the people doing it. You now have a number to measure automation investment against.
3. Review Your Cybersecurity Posture
- Are all business devices running current operating systems?
- Do you have multi-factor authentication enabled on email and critical systems?
- When did you last review who has access to what?
- Do you have a tested backup and recovery process?
- Are your software dependencies (CMS plugins, libraries, frameworks) up to date?
Cyber incidents are disproportionately costly for small and medium businesses. Most successful attacks exploit known vulnerabilities and poor access management, not sophisticated zero-days.
4. Assess Your Customer-Facing Digital Presence
When did you last test your website on a mobile device on a slow connection? Run it through Google PageSpeed Insights. Ask someone outside your organisation to try to find your phone number or complete your contact form.
Your website is often the first experience a prospect has of your business. If that experience is poor, some of them won’t come back.
5. Talk to the People Who Use Your Systems
The people closest to your operational software usually have the clearest picture of where it falls short. A quick conversation with the team members who use your systems most heavily often surfaces friction points that leadership isn’t aware of.
These conversations sometimes reveal that a small investment in training would solve a problem that was being attributed to the software. More often, they surface genuine gaps worth addressing.
6. Prioritise by Business Impact
Once you have a list of issues and opportunities, prioritise them by the answer to one question: which of these, if fixed, would have the biggest positive impact on the business?
Not the most technically interesting. Not the one someone has been asking about longest. The one that would generate the most revenue, save the most time, or reduce the most risk.
That’s where the budget should go first.
Want a structured technology review for your business? Get in touch — we offer discovery sessions designed to give you a clear picture of where to focus in the year ahead.