Managed Print
Are you spending too much on printing?
The costs of running your printer in your business does not stop at the initial purchase costs of the devices themselves. Each printer has a cost of ownership during its lifetime that needs to be calculated to work out the true cost of ownership of the device.
Printers are often cleverly sold with cheap initial costs for the device that is subsidised by the expensive costs of the consumables required to run it. This means that the cheapest device to buy at the time of purchase, may well cost you a lot more in the long run.
True Cost of ownership
The true cost of running the printer relies on many factors, we have listed these below:-
Duty cycle of the printer
This is the number of pages per month that a printer of that type is expected to output, generally the higher the duty cycle the cheaper the cost per print to run.
Number of consumable components
The amount of consumables a printer uses determines the cost to run the device over its lifetime. A simple monochrome printer may have just a single cartridge that includes everything consumable and is swapped in one go.
A complex laser printer may have considerably more, there may be various consumable devices such as 4 toner cartridges, 4 developer units, 4 imaging cartridges and a transfer belt and before you know it all of these will need to be changed depending on print usage over time.
Device Warranty
The length of manufacturer warranty can have a massive impact on the total cost of ownership of the printer over its lifetime. A printer with a 1 year warranty may suffer a major failure that could be uneconomical to repair within month 13 of ownership rendering the entire investment worthless. As we know printers can be tempremental devices and often need the visit of a friendly engineer to fix. We would strongly recommend going for a device with a 3 year manufacturers warranty, or purchasing an extended warranty or care pack to cover the device for up to three years.
Our top money saving tips to save on printing costs
- Only buy colour laser printers that have a dedicated black cartridge, otherwise you will run all of the colour cartridges out quicker as it combines all colours to produce black and it will cost a small fortune to print.
- Don’t buy a colour departmental printer unless you absolutely need to print in colour. A colour printer costs around 30 times per print more the monochrome, the best way to stop users printing in colour and burning through costly consumables at £80+ a cartridge is to not give them the option and provide a monochrome printer only.
- Don’t buy the cheapest printer you see, check up on the cartridges it uses and find out how much they cost first. You may save £50 on the printer initially and then spend another £30 per cartridge more every time that it needs replacing, project that over the next 5 years and it is not a wise move.
- Look for a 3 year on-site warranty or buy an extended warranty or care-pack.
- Avoid inkjet printers, they will fly though their cartridges quicker than you can order them.
- Dont assume your stationary supplier is the cheapest place to buy your cartridges, they are not.
- Try to standardise on the type and model of printers you use in the business, this will save you having to keep 5 different types of spare cartridges in stock that you may never use. Keep the printer the same, you can keep one spare cartridge for all of the machines and order a replacement as it is used.
- Don’t stock up too heavily on spare consumables, you may end up with a printer that goes wrong and is written off as uneconomical repair, but then end up with a stationary cupboard filled with £500 worth of cartridges for a printer that you have just dropped off at the tip, keep the minimum stock that you need.
- Be carefull when using cheaper re-manufacturered toners when the machine is still in warranty. If the printer goes wrong and the engineer finds that you have used non genuine toners, it will invalidate the warranty and you may get charged for the call out.
Buy your consumables from us and we will maintain your printer for free !!
If you have an existing estate of printers, if you were to buy our remanufactured printer cartridges, which are around 50% cheaper than the originals we will provide your printer maintenance for free.
All we need is a list of the printers you have and we will provide you with a list of the cartridges in use and a price for each. As long as you use our consumables we will provide hardware maintenance to the printers for free, you will only pay for any parts required to service them and will not be charge for the call out or labour to fit.