Twelve Headcount, One Number: A Singapore Trading House Rebuilds Its IT Budget Per Person

TL;DR: A Singapore commodities trading house could not forecast its IT spend, because IT was bought as a string of projects and emergencies rather than as a service. Moving the budget onto a published per-user monthly outsourcing rate did not make the number smaller. It made the number knowable, attributable to a desk, and arguable on its merits.

The story below is an illustrative composite drawn from the kind of Singapore mid-market business Brocent works with. It is not a named client, and the firm described is not a real company. The pricing, however, is entirely real — every figure in the numbers section is the live Singapore rate published on Brocent's own pricing pages at the time of writing.

The one cost a trading house has never expressed per unit

Singapore commodities trading houses are unusually good at unit economics. Ask the finance function what a tonne costs to move, what a cargo costs to finance, or what a desk costs to run at current rates, and you get an answer with a decimal point in it. The whole business is built on knowing the cost of one more of something.

IT is almost always the exception. In a firm of ninety to a hundred and forty people — a front office in the CBD, a smaller operations and documentation team, a compliance function that has grown faster than anybody planned — IT shows up on the management accounts as a single line that behaves like weather. Some months it is almost nothing. Some months it is a five-figure surprise. Nobody can say what it costs to seat one more trader, because nobody has ever been able to divide the line by anything meaningful.

This matters more in trading than in most industries, for three reasons that have nothing to do with technology.

The first is that headcount moves with the book. A desk gets added because a commodity looks interesting for the next two years; a desk gets wound down when it does not. Support functions lag those moves by a quarter or two. A firm can genuinely be at 96 people in March and 128 in November without anything unusual having happened.

The second is that onboarding is bursty and time-critical. Traders do not start gradually. They start on a Monday with market access, communications recording, entitlements, a laptop configured the way they expect, and a phone that works — or they do not start at all, and somebody senior is standing in the corridor asking why.

The third is that the finance function is used to being able to *attribute* cost. If the metals desk costs more to run than the softs desk, finance wants to know by how much and why. An IT line that cannot be split by desk is an IT line that cannot participate in that conversation, which in practice means it gets treated as overhead and squeezed on instinct rather than on analysis.

The scenario: twelve months of IT, bought twelve different ways

Here is what the year actually looked like at our composite firm, reconstructed from the general ledger during a budget review.

In January, six new operations hires arrived and a batch of laptops was bought at retail, urgently, because the planned order had not been placed. In March, a firewall support contract renewed on a three-year term nobody remembered signing. In April, a consultant spent nine days on a file-share migration that had been scoped as four. In June, a switch failed in the comms room on a Saturday morning and an engineer came out at weekend rates. In August, Microsoft licences were trued up after somebody counted more assigned seats than expected. In October, a "small" project to tidy up shared mailboxes turned into a fortnight. November was quiet. In December, compliance asked for six months of remote-access records at short notice, and producing them took four days of somebody's time because the records lived in three places.

Every one of those was a defensible decision on its own day. Together they produced a line item that swung between S$2,000 and S$40,000 a month with no pattern a forecast could use.

So the budget was set the way budgets get set in that situation: last year's total, plus a percentage, plus a private hope. And because the number had no internal structure, every overrun became an argument in which neither side could actually be right. The finance director could not say the spend was unjustified, because each item was justified. The operations lead could not say the budget was too low, because there was no model that produced a different number. Both were arguing about variance while believing they were arguing about level.

What the project-shaped budget was really costing

The direct money was not the interesting part. Four other costs were larger, and none of them appeared anywhere on the ledger.

Nobody could answer "what does one more person cost?" When the metals desk asked to add three people, the honest answer was "somewhere between four and fifteen thousand dollars of setup, and we will find out." That is not an answer a business case can be built on, so the IT component simply got left out of business cases — which meant it was always a surprise later.

IT could not be charged back. Because there was no per-head unit, the whole line sat in central overhead. The desks that generated the most support demand — the ones with the most people, the most devices, the most after-hours activity — were subsidised by the ones that generated the least. Nobody intended this. It is just what happens when a cost has no unit.

Preventive work was structurally disadvantaged. This is the subtle one. In a time-and-materials world, every hour of preventive maintenance is a visible, immediate, arguable cost, while the incident it would have prevented is invisible and hypothetical. A finance director asked to approve twelve hours of patching against a backlog of other requests will, quite rationally, defer it. Then the incident happens, the emergency hours cost more than the preventive hours would have, and the lesson learned is "IT is expensive" rather than "we deferred the cheap version of this."

Procurement overhead was paid per event. Each of those twelve purchases carried its own quote, its own approval, its own purchase order, its own invoice reconciliation, and its own small negotiation. Finance's own time was the cost nobody counted.

What per-user pricing is actually for

It is worth being blunt about this, because the industry oversells it: per-user pricing is not automatically cheaper. Anyone who tells a finance director otherwise is selling rather than explaining.

What per-user pricing does is change the *shape* of the cost, and shape was what was broken at our composite firm. Three things follow from that change.

It gives IT the same grammar as every other cost in the business. A published monthly rate per user means the IT line can finally be divided by headcount, attributed to a desk, forecast forward against the hiring plan, and defended in the same terms as every other per-head cost — because that is now literally what it is. When the metals desk asks for three more people, the IT component of that decision becomes arithmetic rather than a guess.

It puts the provider on the same side of the incident. Under time-and-materials, a provider's revenue rises when your environment misbehaves. This is not a claim that providers act in bad faith — most do not — but it is an uncomfortable structural fact, and everyone in the room knows it. Under a fixed monthly fee, the provider is paid the same whether your Monday is quiet or catastrophic, so the provider's commercial interest and your operational interest point the same direction for the first time. Preventive work stops being a line you have to approve and starts being something the provider wants to do.

It makes budgeting itself a service rather than an annual scramble. On Brocent's managed IT plans, IT budget preparation is an actual plan feature rather than a favour: it is billable on the entry Startup tier, delivered annually on Established, and twice a year on Growth and Enterprise, alongside asset and inventory management on the same cadence and a monthly executive report on every tier. For a finance director, that is the difference between reconstructing the year from invoices in November and being handed a forward view twice a year by the people who actually run the environment.

The honest counter-case

There is a real category of business for which per-user pricing is the wrong instrument, and it deserves saying clearly.

If your organisation genuinely consumes IT episodically — a small, stable headcount, a simple environment, long quiet stretches punctuated by occasional project work — then paying a monthly fee per user for continuous coverage you rarely draw on is poor value. What you want in that case is prepaid capacity, not a subscription. That is exactly why prepaid token packages exist alongside the plans, and Brocent's own published rule of thumb is unusually candid about where the line falls: above roughly four tickets a month the plan is usually cheaper; below that, tokens usually are.

Most trading houses of ninety-plus people sit comfortably on the plan side of that line. But the test is the ticket volume and the risk profile, not the org chart, and a provider who will not tell you which side you are on is telling you something.

What the numbers actually look like

These are the live Singapore figures from Brocent's published plan pricing, in Singapore dollars, per user per month. Brocent publishes them per market rather than converting a single global rate, and the pricing page carries its own validity date — check it rather than trusting a figure quoted in an article.

• Startup — S$126.36 per user / month. Sized for 1–5 employees. One device per user, one remote-workforce device, one complimentary onboarding hour. IT budget preparation is billable rather than included at this tier.
• Established — S$185.08 per user / month. Sized for 5–300 employees. Up to three devices per user, a dedicated account manager, five complimentary onboarding hours, annual IT budget preparation, and website and domain monitoring.
• Growth — S$227.20 per user / month. Sized for 10–500 employees. Three devices per user, a dedicated Service Desk agent on top of the account manager, ten complimentary onboarding hours, and IT budget preparation twice a year.
• Enterprise — custom quote. Sized for 25+ employees. Adds a dedicated infrastructure support engineer, IT vendor management covering up to ten vendors, twenty complimentary onboarding hours, and up to five devices per user.

A note on those bands, because it confuses people who expect them to be tidy: the employee ranges overlap on purpose. Established is quoted for 5–300 and Growth for 10–500, so a 120-person firm sits inside both. That is not an error in the pricing page. The tiers are distinguished by what is included — the dedicated Service Desk agent, the onboarding allowance, the budget-planning cadence — rather than by a size band that mechanically sorts you. A firm of 120 people with a simple estate and low ticket volume may be correctly served by Established; a firm of the same size with three sites and a compliance obligation may not be. Which is why anything in the overlap is a conversation rather than a lookup.

Every plan, including the entry tier, includes 24×7×365 monitoring, a 15-minute first-response target for P1 incidents, multilingual support, a managed premium firewall, Microsoft and third-party application updates, endpoint and network infrastructure monitoring, token-based onsite support that explicitly covers evenings, weekends and public holidays, and a monthly executive report. Plans are billed monthly with no long-term commitment required; discounted annual and multi-year terms are available if you would rather fix the rate.

Running the composite firm's numbers

Our trading house has about 120 people. At the published Growth rate of S$227.20 per user per month, 120 users is S$27,264 a month, or S$327,168 a year — before any add-ons, and before whatever an Enterprise-tier conversation would produce at that headcount.

Two things are worth saying about that number rather than letting it sit there.

First, it is almost certainly higher than what the firm spent in a quiet month and lower than what it spent in a bad quarter. That is the whole point and also the whole objection: per-user pricing converts a volatile average into a known constant, and part of what that constant buys is the absence of bad quarters. Whether the trade is worth it is a judgement about the firm's tolerance for variance, not a calculation with one right answer.

Second — and this is where finance directors usually stop nodding and start engaging — the number now *divides*. Three more heads on the metals desk is S$681.60 a month, every month, knowable before the offer letter goes out. A desk of eighteen people carries S$4,089.60 of IT cost. Those are sentences the business can act on, and no ad hoc arrangement can produce them.

We are deliberately not putting a total-cost-of-ownership comparison against hiring internal IT staff here, because doing it honestly requires salary assumptions we would be inventing. If that is the comparison you need, we wrote it up separately for Singapore in managed IT versus an in-house IT team.

And the token alternative, priced honestly

The Singapore token packages, for comparison, are: Starter — 20 tokens for S$1,148.76. Business — 50 tokens for S$2,552.80. Pro — 100 tokens for S$4,467.40. A 250-token Enterprise pack is quoted individually. One token is one hour of onsite engineering time in business hours; remote work is billed in 15-minute blocks, so four blocks make a token and short remote fixes cost less than a full one. Tokens are valid twelve months from purchase.

Divide the packs out and the effective hourly rates fall as you buy more — S$57.44, S$51.06 and S$44.67 per hour for the Starter, Business and Pro packs respectively. Onsite visits carry a two-token minimum in business hours; evenings bill at 1.5 tokens per hour after a three-token minimum, late nights and weekends at two tokens per hour after a four-token minimum, and public holidays at three tokens per hour after a six-token minimum. All of that is published rather than negotiated per incident, which is itself the point — even the pay-as-you-go option becomes forecastable once you know your own pattern.

For our composite firm, the Pro pack is 100 hours of engineering for S$4,467.40. Against roughly 120 people generating a realistic ticket load, that is a few weeks of coverage, not a year of it. Which is exactly what you would expect: tokens are the right instrument for overflow, after-hours dispatch and discrete projects, and the wrong instrument for continuous operation of an estate that size. Many firms run both — a plan for the baseline, tokens for the spikes and the site visits — and that is a coherent structure rather than a contradiction.

Three ways to buy IT support in Singapore

• Ad hoc / time-and-materials. *Genuinely suits:* very small firms, one-off projects, and organisations with real internal IT who need occasional specialist hands. *What you are accepting:* an unforecastable line item, a provider whose revenue rises with your problems, per-event procurement overhead, and no structural owner for preventive work. *The tell:* you cannot answer "what does one more employee cost?"
• Prepaid token packages. *Genuinely suits:* stable headcount, simple estates, fewer than about four tickets a month, or an existing IT function that needs overflow capacity, after-hours dispatch and site visits at a published rate. *What you are accepting:* a balance somebody has to manage, a twelve-month validity window, and the fact that prepaid hours still measure activity rather than outcomes. *The tell:* your demand is lumpy but small, and what you mostly want is the emergency path priced in advance.
• Per-user managed plan. *Genuinely suits:* firms above roughly four tickets a month, anyone with a hiring plan that moves, and any business that needs to attribute IT cost to a desk or an entity. *What you are accepting:* a fixed monthly cost that does not fall in quiet months, and a tier decision that requires an actual conversation because the size bands overlap. *What you get:* a number that divides by headcount, a provider paid the same whether or not things break, budget preparation as a delivered service, and a single audit trail instead of a folder of invoices.

Where this leaves the finance director

The trading house in this story did not save a dramatic amount of money in year one. What changed was that the IT line stopped being a source of arguments neither side could win.

The budget was built from the hiring plan instead of from last year's total. Desks could be quoted a per-head IT cost before the headcount was approved rather than after. The December compliance request — six months of remote-access records — became a request to one provider with one audit trail rather than an archaeology exercise across three vendors. And the preventive work that had been perpetually deferred simply happened, because it was no longer a line anybody had to approve.

If your IT line looks like weather and you would rather it looked like a rate, the two places to start are the published per-market plan pricing and the detail of what a managed IT service actually carries — or talk to us and ask for the tier comparison against your real headcount and ticket volume rather than against a size band.

Brocent has been doing this since 2007, when the company started in Beijing; the Hong Kong office opened in 2016, and Singapore has been the group's global headquarters since 2021. Singapore firms are quoted in Singapore dollars, by people in the same time zone, against prices published on the website rather than assembled for the occasion.

Frequently asked questions

What does per-user IT pricing actually include?

On Brocent's plans, every tier includes 24×7×365 monitoring, a 15-minute first-response target for P1 incidents, multilingual support, a managed premium firewall, Microsoft and third-party application patching, endpoint and network monitoring, token-based onsite support covering out-of-hours, weekends and public holidays, and a monthly executive report. Higher tiers add named people rather than more features in the abstract: a dedicated account manager from Established, a dedicated Service Desk agent from Growth, and a dedicated infrastructure support engineer plus vendor management at Enterprise. Add-ons — mobile device management, cloud backup, cloud VM hosting, vulnerability scanning, patch management, security awareness training, MDR/EDR, SOC-as-a-Service and vCISO — sit outside the base plan and are priced separately, which is deliberate: bundling them invisibly is how "all-inclusive" quotes become uncomparable.

What happens when headcount drops?

The bill drops with it, which is the mechanical consequence of pricing per user and the main reason the model suits businesses whose headcount moves. Plans are billed monthly with no long-term commitment required, so a desk wound down in Q3 stops being billed rather than sitting inside a fixed annual contract until renewal. If you would rather trade that flexibility for a lower rate, discounted annual and multi-year terms are available — your account manager should quote both, so you can see what the flexibility is costing you.

Are contractors and shared accounts counted as users?

This is the question that decides whether two quotes are actually comparable, and you should ask it of every provider on your list. The practical answer is that a "user" is a person who receives support and whose devices are managed — which usually includes long-term contractors sitting at your desks, and usually excludes a shared mailbox, a service account or a meeting-room display, though those may still be managed as devices. Note that the plans also carry a device allowance per user: one device on Startup, three on Established and Growth, five on Enterprise. A trader with a workstation, a laptop and a managed phone is one user with three devices, not three users. Get the definition written into the proposal, because a provider counting shared accounts as users can quote a headline rate that looks lower and a bill that is not.

Is per-user always cheaper than hourly?

No, and be wary of anyone who says otherwise. Below roughly four tickets a month, prepaid tokens usually work out cheaper than a plan — that is Brocent's own published guidance, not a concession. The plan wins when ticket volume is continuous, when preventive work matters, when you need cost attribution by desk or entity, or when the variance itself is the problem you are solving. A provider who will not tell you which side of that line you are on has not looked at your ticket data.

How do project costs like an office move work under a per-user plan?

They sit outside it. A plan covers the ongoing operation of your environment; a cabling job, a floor move, a data-centre migration or a large deployment is a project, scoped and quoted separately. That is not a loophole — no honest monthly per-head fee can absorb an office relocation — but it *is* something to pin down in writing before you sign, because "included" means very different things in different proposals. Ask specifically which activities are plan work, which draw on tokens, and which are quoted as projects.

What is not included?

Hardware and software purchases, third-party licences, project work as above, and the add-on catalogue: mobile device management, cloud backup and cloud VM hosting, vulnerability scanning, patch management as a discrete service, security awareness training, MDR/EDR, SOC-as-a-Service and vCISO. MDM in particular is a common assumption — it is an add-on on every tier, not part of the base plan. Incident response beyond the base antivirus and EDR is bundled at Enterprise and available as an add-on below it.

Can we mix a plan with prepaid tokens?

Yes, and for a business with a bursty profile it is often the right structure. The plan carries the continuous baseline — monitoring, help desk, patching, the security baseline — while tokens absorb the discrete things: an onsite visit at short notice, weekend or public-holiday dispatch, a defined piece of project work. Token-based onsite support is in fact already part of what every plan tier carries, so the two are designed to interlock rather than compete.

How often does the per-user rate change?

The rates on the pricing page carry their own validity date, refreshed on the page itself rather than quoted indefinitely — which is why this article tells you to check the page rather than trusting the figures reproduced here. Under a signed plan, your rate is what your agreement says for the term you agreed; monthly billing means a monthly rate, while annual and multi-year terms fix it for longer in exchange for a discount. Any provider unwilling to state in writing what triggers a rate change, and with how much notice, is asking you to sign for an unknown.