Financial year-end IT checklist: what to buy, retire, and audit before March 31
The short version. A financial year-end IT checklist is not a shopping list. It is the one week a year you retire the dead machines, catch the licences you are still paying for, and fix the DPDP gaps before an auditor finds them. Do it before March 31 and the spend lands in this year’s books, where your CFO wants it. Skip it and you carry the mess, and the risk, into the new year.
Riya here. Last week of February. Sanjay, who runs finance for a 130-seat auto-components firm in Pune, sent me a one-line email at 9 in the morning. “Before we close the year, is our IT actually in order?” That email is the reason this post exists. What follows is the year-end IT checklist I walked his team through, in the order we walked it, so you can run the same pass on your own fleet before the deadline.
We started in the store room. Every Indian office has one. Nobody had opened his since Diwali.
The store room nobody had opened since Diwali
Deepa, his IT lead, found the key after ten minutes. Inside were 22 laptops nobody could account for. Some were spares. Some were dead. Two were “with a resigned employee, sir, we think.” That last sentence is where most year-end audits actually begin.
Here is the thing about the box in the corner. On the books, those 22 machines were still assets. In the room, four of them would not power on. A laptop you have written off in your head but not on paper is a tax position you are getting wrong, and a DPDP exposure you have not counted. Employee PAN details and customer phone lists sit on those drives long after the person has gone.
So the buy-and-retire pass is not about new toys. It is about matching the room to the ledger. We tagged every machine as keep, refresh, or retire. Eleven were past their refresh date and limping. This is exactly the grind that good device lifecycle management is supposed to remove from your week, so Deepa is planning the fleet instead of hunting for a key in February.
The licences Sanjay was still paying for
Next was the subscription list. This is where finance and IT usually discover they have never once sat in the same room. Sanjay was paying for 138 Microsoft 365 seats. The firm had 130 people. Eight of those seats belonged to staff who had left, one as far back as August. Nobody had told the reseller to stop the meter.
Then came the CapEx question, the one every CFO raises at year-end. Sanjay had done the raw multiplication. Monthly times sixty months, and buying the laptops outright beat any subscription on his spreadsheet. He said so, plainly.
I told him the spreadsheet was missing three things it would never show him. It was missing the repairs he would pay on year-four machines. It was missing the productivity his team loses when a laptop dies in the middle of a quarter and sits at a service centre for a week. And it was missing the quietest fact of all, that most firms who own outright never actually refresh on time, so the “five-year” plan becomes a seven-year drag on the people using the kit. Ownership also parks the whole cost as CapEx in one year. A Device-as-a-Service arrangement turns it into a predictable monthly line at around Rs 749 per device per month*, which your tax position may prefer. I did not tell him to switch. I told him to run the four-year comparison with those costs in, then decide. That is a different exercise from the one his spreadsheet had done.
The math we did on his whiteboard
For the 11 limping laptops, we put both paths on the board. Owning them meant a fresh purchase now plus the repair drag already showing up. The numbers are illustrative, but the shape holds for most mid-size fleets.
| Line item, per laptop | Buy outright | DaaS, 4-year |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront cash this March | Rs 52,000 | Rs 0 |
| Monthly cost | Nil | ~Rs 749/mo* |
| Repairs, year 3 to 4 | Your cost | Included |
| Refresh at end of life | Often skipped | Built in |
| Books treatment | CapEx, one hit | OpEx, monthly |
| Depreciation to track | 40% WDV, yearly | Not your asset |
That depreciation row matters at year-end. Under the Income Tax rules, computers depreciate at 40% written-down value a year. By year four an owned laptop is worth almost nothing on paper while still costing you real money in repairs. That gap is the number CFOs miss when they only do the multiplication.
What I told Sanjay to do before March 31
Buy the 11 refreshes, or move them to DaaS, but decide this month so it lands in this year’s books. Retire the four dead machines properly, with the drives wiped and logged, not tossed in the store room for another Diwali. Cancel the eight ghost licences today. And book a DPDP gap check, because a year-end audit that ignores where personal data sits is only half an audit.
He asked if the data really was that sensitive. Most owners ask this. His firm holds employee PAN numbers, salary records, and a customer list with phone numbers on nearly every machine. Under the DPDP Act the penalty for failing to protect that runs up to Rs 250 crore per instance, a figure worth reading straight from the Ministry and the Act text rather than taking my word for it. We have seen a single unmonitored laptop turn into a leak that cost a logistics firm far more than the machine ever earned. That is what data loss prevention is for, and it is why the DPDP line belongs on the year-end list, not the “next quarter” list.
The year-end IT checklist, the version I actually use
Here is the checklist Deepa kept. Three passes. Run them in this order, because each one feeds the next.
Buy, before the books close
- List every machine past its refresh date, not the ones that have failed, the ones about to.
- Decide buy or DaaS on those, and commit this financial year so the cost lands where you want it.
- Order any warranty renewals now. A lapsed AMC discovered in April is a full-price panic in May.
- Check your accessory and spares stock. A fleet with no spare charger loses a person for a day.
Retire, properly
- Pull every dead or spare machine out of the store room and match it to the asset register.
- Wipe drives on anything leaving the building, and log the wipe. A verbal “we formatted it” is not a record.
- Close the loop on devices with resigned staff. Recover or account for each one before the audit does.
- Write off what is genuinely dead, so the ledger stops lying to your CFO.
Audit, so nothing surprises you in April
- Reconcile software licences against actual headcount. Cancel every seat with no person behind it.
- Map where personal data physically sits, then check that machine against the DPDP compliance checklist.
- Review who still has admin rights and remote access, especially former vendors.
- Check your power and backup story. A UPS with a tired battery bank fails on the one Friday you cannot afford it.
That is the whole thing. Nothing clever. The firms that do it are calm in April. The firms that skip it spend April explaining to a CFO why the numbers do not match the room.
Questions Sanjay wishes he had asked in January
When exactly should we run the year-end IT audit?
Start in the first week of February. You want the buy decisions committed before March 31 so the spend and the depreciation land in this financial year. Leave it to mid-March and the reseller lead times alone will push half your list into next year.
Do we really need to retire old laptops, or can we just leave them in the store?
Retire them. A dead machine on the books is a wrong tax position, and a live drive in a cupboard is a DPDP risk. Wipe it, log it, write it off. The store room is not a strategy.
Is Device-as-a-Service better than buying at year-end?
Not always. If you own outright, refresh on schedule, and have in-house repair, buying can be the right call. If your refreshes slip and repairs pile up on year-four machines, DaaS at a fixed monthly cost usually wins on total spend and moves you from CapEx to OpEx. Run the four-year comparison with repair and downtime costs in, then judge.
What is the one thing most Indian firms miss in a year-end IT check?
Licences for people who have left. It is the cheapest fix and the most common leak. We have seen firms paying for a fifth of their seats to nobody. Start there.
Still deciding where to start
If you want a second pair of eyes, we will run the same three-pass audit on your fleet that Deepa and I ran in that Pune store room. Buy list, retire list, DPDP gap check. Free, no card, no contract, no sales call. Sirius Star has done this for 200+ Indian businesses over 17+ years, including the lifecycle for a 2,500-device national insurer, and we are based in Vashi, Navi Mumbai if you want to sit across a table.
200+ Indian businesses trust Sirius Star. We reply within 24 working hours. WhatsApp on +91 91375 93228 or write to care@siriusstar.in, 10 to 7 IST.
P.S. Riya again. The four dead laptops in Sanjay’s store room had been “with a resigned employee” for seven months. One of them held a full customer contact export. Nobody had thought about it once until we opened the door. That is the whole argument for the year-end pass. You are not shopping. You are closing doors you forgot were open. *Indicative pricing, varies by device and term.
