Most every company owns and/or leases a copy machine. In most cases these copiers are covered under a maintenance/supply agreement. The billing model that is most prevalent is where a company charges a fee for “x” amount of pages for black and color prints/copies. Those contracts are to be billed annually, quarterly or monthly. In addition to the base charges (annual, quarterly or month), there is also a charge for prints/copies that were made in excess of the agreement. For example, Annual Cost for 60K black pages is $900 and annual cost for 10K color pages is $800. Therefore, the annual base cost for both is $1,700. Our example user made 70,000 black and 15,000 in color. These overages generated an additional bill to the client. In this case 10,000 black billed for an additional $150 and the color billed for an addition $400.
Cost Per Page Overages
Just like I can’t predict what orders I’ll get each month, most businesses can’t predict the amount of charges that they will generate in overages. Years ago, overage billing really wasn’t an issue. The main reason was that the overages were only for black prints/copies. Now, with such a large percentage of the copier population being able to produce color prints/copies, a mere 10,000 page overage could cost a company an additional $800 for the year, quarter or month.
I would say, on average, most maintenance/supply agreements are billed quarterly, therefore that $800 overage for color pages ends up costing a company an additional $3,200 for the year.
How to Eliminate You Overage Cost
I’m a huge fan of print rules software because of these reasons:
Who prints documents from the web? If so, you’re printing those pages in color and increasing your costs. We can set a rule that all web pages print as black.
Email. Believe it or not, there are many of us who still print emails. It’s the CYA thing. I’m all for CYA, but do we need to have that little color logo print at the cost of full color? Across a large corporation, I could only guess the tens of thousands of emails printed off each month
Duplex two-sided printing. Why not institute a Print Audit Rule for auto two-sided printing. You could set a rule for “any document more than 10 pages.”
How about those ink jet printers in the office? Another useful rule can be one that states all text or word documents print as black and print jobs are directed to the lower cost copier.
The hammer and the feather approach. You could also set up “pop ups” that can help users move documents to lower cost devices. The feather approach is to enable a pop up that could state, “Please send your documents to the lower cost copier,” where as the hammer approach would enable a pop up that states, “Your print job has been redirected to XYZ copier.”
Print Audit Rules software is also device agnostic. No matter what brand networked printer or copier that you have, your company can benefit from eliminating overages on those copiers.
The list of rules is too long to list, however if you’re serious about eliminating overages then I highly recommend adding Print Audit Rules software.
Print Habits
How can companies get an insight to their printing habits? How many emails are we are printing; how many internet pages are we printing; who is printing to what devices, and what’s the cost per device.
The answer is Insight. The Insight software has the ability to gather data on your companies printing habits. Once enabled, we can gather that data and help your company and team better understand your printing habits.
Cut your overages, lower your costs, meet green initiatives, reduce paper, and control abusive print behaviors.
Comments are always welcome!
