The PC that dies at 4 p.m. on a Friday, the mail that will not send, the new hire still waiting for a Microsoft 365 account three days later: in a fifteen-person Belgian firm, IT often arrives in bursts. The manager calls someone who “knows computers”, gets an emergency invoice, and wonders whether to hire, buy a prepaid pack or sign a managed-services deal. All four options exist; they do not buy the same thing.
Four ways to buy IT time
On-demand troubleshooting (the “ticket”) shows up when something is already broken. A prepaid hour pack reserves a volume of time to use over a period. A managed-services contract (often called MSP / infogérance) bills a monthly fee: monitoring, patching, helpdesk, sometimes a written response-time commitment. An in-house hire is an employee under a labour contract, with ONSS affiliation.
Plenty of managers confuse packs with managed services. A pack is not a 24/7 on-call roster. If there is no written SLA, there is no contractual response time — only whatever the provider put in its terms. The other way round is just as common: a “managed” deal that only answers tickets and never watches the backups is not what you thought you signed.
The ticket: fine for surprises, expensive as a strategy
Calling a freelancer or a firm when the server will not boot is normal. You pay afterwards, usually by the hour. That works for the unexpected. It works less well when the same scene repeats every month: new workstation, forgotten password, printer, failed backup.
The risk is not only the urgency rate. It is the lack of memory. Each person rediscovers your environment, bills the discovery time, and leaves. If tickets are your only IT strategy, you are mostly financing rediscovery of your own estate.
The hour pack: reserved time, not an embedded team
A pack is prepaid time: a number of hours, a validity window, sometimes weekday contact hours. Several Belgian providers, including z80 in Liège, sell it as a shop product: you buy a volume and draw it down as needs appear. It is a service subject to VAT, not a wage.
That shape fits when the need is real but intermittent: scoping a small project, migrating a mailbox, cleaning up access rights, accompanying an Odoo rollout for a few weeks. You roughly know how many hours you will burn; you do not want to open a headcount.
Read before you pay: validity (do unused hours lapse?), time rounding, what is included (travel, hardware), and what is not promised. A pack with no response-time commitment is a stock of hours. If the contract says “reply within X hours”, that is a clause; if not, you are relying on goodwill.
I sell this kind of pack. I do not sell it as managed services in disguise. When a firm needs someone watching backups every morning and patching the estate, that is a different contract.
Managed services: the retainer that must say what it watches
Managed IT is for firms that want to hand over the daily layer: endpoint security, updates, backups, account creation, a ticket queue. Billing is usually per user per month, often in tiers (remote only, remote plus on-site, proactive monitoring).
Before you trust the word “unlimited”, ask what is actually monitored, what written time-to-engagement (not time-to-fix) applies on a blocking incident, and what sits outside the fee — projects, hardware, migrations. “Unlimited” with a fair-use cap of a few tickets per month is common; that is not 24/7 availability.
If your main pain is the Friday outage and nobody inside wants to own IT, managed services make sense. If you mostly need a one-off project, you may pay a retainer for hours you never use.
Hiring in-house: when the volume justifies a labour contract
Hiring an IT person changes the legal nature of the relationship. Labour contract, employer authority, ONSS contributions, leave. For a firm with enough day-to-day work and that wants someone in the room, it can be the right answer. Total cost is more than net pay, and one person does not cover holidays nor always the whole stack. Many SMEs end up with an in-house hire plus an external specialist for the sharp edges.
What to avoid: turning a freelancer into a de facto employee — exclusive desk, imposed hours, org chart, a single client — while still paying on invoices. In Belgium the label on the contract is not enough.
Independent or employee: facts beat the label
The programme act of 27 December 2006 starts from the parties’ will, provided day-to-day performance matches it. INASTI and the FPS Employment use four general criteria to assess a link of authority: the parties’ will as lived, freedom to organise working time, freedom to organise the work, and the possibility of hierarchical control. No single criterion decides alone. So-called neutral elements — the title of the agreement, a company number, VAT registration, affiliation to a social-insurance fund — are not enough on their own to prove independence.
The sectors with a legal presumption (construction, security, transport, cleaning, agriculture, digital platforms) do not include IT as such. For an IT provider you stay on the general criteria. If there is doubt, the parties can go to the Administrative Commission for the regulation of the employment relationship. This is not legal advice: a social secretariat or employment lawyer reads how you actually work together.
In practice, an hour pack where the provider chooses how and when to work, bills per engagement, has no exclusive desk at your site and may have other clients fits a services contract better than a “freelancer” present five days a week under the manager’s orders.
Before you sign
1. Am I paying for time (pack / ticket), for availability and supervision (managed services), or for an employee?
2. What engagement time is written down — and for which class of incident?
3. What happens to unused hours, and how is time rounded?
4. Who documents my estate so the next person does not start from zero?
5. For a regular independent: do they organise their own work, or are they treated as staff without the label?
If part of your IT load is still redoing the same weekly loops — reminders, exports, account creation — also look at automating those repetitive loops before you buy more hours to do them by hand again.
To scope what you actually need: info@z80.be, +32 494 111 041.