Leasing a Printer or Buying One, the Honest Arithmetic for a Canadian Business

Most offices decide this the same way. Someone looks at the price of a proper office copier, looks at the price of a printer at a big box store, and the conversation ends there. I understand why. One number is four hundred dollars and the other is a few thousand, and that looks like the whole story.

It is not the whole story, and the reason has nothing to do with which printer is better built. It is that you are comparing a purchase against a monthly cost, and until you put both of them on the same footing you cannot see which one is actually cheaper.

What a lease covers, and what it does not

A lease covers the cost of acquiring the solution, and that is usually more than one printer. It is worth saying plainly, because it is where most of the confusion starts.

If the right answer for your office is a larger copier at the main location and a smaller printer at the back, both are in it. If there is print management or scanning software that comes with them, that is in it. So is the implementation work, the delivery, the install, the configuration and the training. It is the whole cost of putting the solution in place, spread across the term rather than paid on one day.

What is not in it is toner, parts and service. Those sit on their own, through a managed print agreement billed on the pages you actually print, with supplies arriving before you run out. They belong there rather than in the lease, because they follow how much you actually print instead of sitting still for five years. So there are two costs, and we show them to you as two numbers rather than one. You should be able to see exactly what you are paying for the equipment and exactly what you are paying for the service, on any agreement from anyone.

Terms run 36 and 60 months in most cases, and leasing is on approved credit. If you would like to work a term through yourself before you speak to anyone, there is an Uptown Lease Advisor calculator on our leasing page.

What it actually costs

I am not going to put a monthly figure on a specific printer here, and I would rather tell you why than pretend the question is complicated.

A number on a page is a number for a bare printer. No second paper tray, no stapling, no fax line, none of the things that decide whether the copier actually suits your office. Published like that it is not useful to you, it is just something to wave at another dealer, and you would end up comparing a stripped copier against a properly configured one and thinking you had found a deal.

What I can tell you is the shape of it, and the shape is the part that matters.

Now put it beside the printer you were going to buy

Say your office runs three thousand pages a month, which is ordinary for a small business doing invoices, manifests and everyday paperwork.

A good desktop laser costs about four hundred dollars and runs somewhere near four to five cents a page once you account for real coverage. That coverage point matters and almost nobody mentions it. Rated cartridge yields assume five percent of the page is covered in toner, which is roughly a short letter with a small logo. Real offices run closer to six or seven percent once forms, charts and letterheads are in the mix, so the true cost per page lands twenty to forty percent above the number on the box.

At three thousand pages, four and a half cents is about one hundred and thirty five dollars a month in toner alone, before drums, fusers or a service call. You can check that arithmetic yourself against any cartridge price you like, because those numbers are printed on the box and published by every manufacturer.

Now the part that surprises people. A proper business multifunction on a managed agreement, with the lease payment and the toner and the service all counted together, comes in under that figure. Not a little under.

So the larger copier is the cheaper printer, monthly, and it is not close. Over five years the gap runs to thousands of dollars, and that is before you count the fact that a desktop unit asked to do three thousand pages a month will not see five years.

There is one more piece of that arithmetic that sits on our side of the table. On a cost per page agreement the rate is the rate. If your pages run heavier than average, that is our cost to carry, not yours.

Colour is where the gap gets serious

Everything above is black and white. Colour is a bigger story, and it is the one most offices have never actually worked out.

A colour page on a desktop inkjet or a small colour laser runs about twenty five cents once you account for four cartridges instead of one. On a business colour printer under a cost per page agreement, the same page runs about eight and a half cents, with the toner and the service included in that rate. Step up again to a larger office copier and it falls further still.

At two thousand colour pages a month, which is an ordinary volume for an office producing proposals and customer facing work, that is five hundred dollars against a hundred and seventy. Three hundred and thirty dollars a month, on the pages alone, before either printer’s purchase or lease is counted at all.

Over a year that is very nearly four thousand dollars. Over five years it is close to twenty thousand.

That is not a rounding error. That is a staff salary line.

The part of colour billing worth asking about

Here is something worth knowing whoever you buy from, because it is the reason most offices believe colour is too expensive to use.

Most agreements bill every colour page at one flat rate. A page with your logo and a coloured heading costs exactly the same as a full page photograph. Once an office works that out, someone locks the copier to black and white, and you spend the next five years paying for a colour photocopier you are not allowed to use.

Kyocera bills colour in tiers, based on how much colour is actually on the page. A letterhead, a chart, a highlighted line, these are light colour pages and they are billed as light colour pages. Customers tell us this saves them somewhere in the range of twenty to thirty percent on their colour printing, and more importantly it means they use the colour they are paying for.

It isn’t to say every office will see that number, because an office printing heavy marketing pieces all day will not. It is simply that most offices print far more light colour than they think, and they are usually being billed as though they do not.

When buying is the right call

We sell printers outright every week, and I would rather tell you plainly when that is the better move.

Buying makes sense on smaller printers, on steady low volumes, and when you have the cash on hand and no appetite for an agreement. If your office prints a few hundred pages a month and nothing urgent depends on the printer, a good desktop printer bought outright is genuinely the right buy, and we sell those too.

Leasing earns its place when the copier is central to how the work gets done. Your capital stays in the business, the cost is level and predictable, and the replacement decision arrives on a schedule instead of on the morning the printer dies.

As for how any of this is treated on your books, that depends on your situation, and we are copier people rather than accountants. Please speak with yours, and we are glad to give them whatever numbers they need.

What happens at the end of the term

Nothing in the agreement forces you to buy the photocopier at the end, and that is deliberate. When the term is up you can trade up to a newer model, return the equipment, or buy it out at what it is worth then.

There is a fourth move we recommend often, and our customers make it all the time. Put the new copier in the busy spot and move the older one to a lighter duty corner, a branch office, a warehouse desk, a quieter department. It keeps working on the service plan, the busy seat gets the speed, and nothing useful goes in a skip. Done right, one agreement upgrades two locations.

Working out your own number

None of this means anything until it is your volume rather than an example.

Your current printer knows what you print. Print a configuration page and it will tell you, and if you have several printers around the office it is worth adding them together, because the total is almost always a surprise. Then the comparison is simple arithmetic, and it is the part we do at no charge, across Kyocera, Xerox and Epson rather than one line, which is the whole reason we carry more than one.

We look after offices across White Rock, Surrey, Langley and Delta, and north through Richmond, New Westminster, Burnaby and Vancouver.

If you would like to know what your printing actually costs you today, and what it would cost on a printer sized for the work, send me the make and model of what you are running and roughly what you print in a month. I am glad to work that out for you, and there is no charge and no obligation attached to it.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Adam Smith
Uptown Business Machines Incorporated
778-291-2849
UBMCanada.com