If the business is the customer, upgrading a machine increases the customer price hence it requires communication as it changes the benefits/cost value proposition.
The trick is to wrap your technology with a service-style abstraction so you don't have to communicate all of these painful little details. Then, all of those details get rolled up into something like a quarterly report.
The terms of this relationship (contract) should be approximately along lines of "you provide us a service with a certain level of quality and in return we grant you an annual budget of $X".
At a certain point, having detailed analysis of every last expense will cost you way more money than it will save.
Not upgrading a machine affects quality of service. If they don’t trust that that’ll happen until they can feel the problem themselves, what do they have an IT team for?
The terms of this relationship (contract) should be approximately along lines of "you provide us a service with a certain level of quality and in return we grant you an annual budget of $X".
At a certain point, having detailed analysis of every last expense will cost you way more money than it will save.