How to Work Out the Cost of Your New Printer

How to Work Out the Cost of Your New Printer

Predicting and knowing your upcoming printer costs is essential for business and home printer users.

For businesses, knowing your expected costs for the month or the quarter can be essential. In some circumstances it can also make the difference between being in profit or falling behind because your expenses have weighed in too much.

If you are part of a large company, it is likely that printing and computing costs are a significant amount of your expense budget. This means that, being able to accurately predict how much a new printer will cost you per month or per quarter, can help you to allocate the right amount of budget for the area.

This is especially important if you have a number of printers throughout your business as the costs only escalate and become more significant should you go over budget or predict the wrong amount.

One of the biggest setbacks with business printer costs, is that it's not often clear how you work them out and what they will be in reality - rather than what the manufacturer advertises it as. However, our simple guide aims to help you find out how much a printer will cost your business - potentially saving you money and hassle in the long run.

Cost of Output

One of the most useful things to work out is the cost of output, meaning how much it will set you back to print each page from your machine. It may sound complicated because of the number of things that you have to factor in or tedious to do but it is actually pretty simple to work out if you know how.

Printer Cost

The first thing, and the most obvious expense to take into consideration, is the cost of your printer. This can range from under £50 for a decent inkjet model or can hit the thousands if you a wanting a large office-friendly laser model. Make sure you know what your company is looking for in a printer before you buy a machine. If you don't do this you risk buying a machine that either won't do everything you need, meaning you need to fork out for another unit, or you will pay more than you want for a printer that does far more than you need.

Before you commit to a machine, you should also make sure that any cables you will need are supplied with the printer - if not you will need to factor this into your budget. You will need to carefully read the listing to see what comes with the machine.

Ink

One of the main expenses, apart from the printer itself, will be the cost of ink. To best calculate this you should find out how many pages the machine will produce for every ink cartridge. Once you know this, work out how many pages your company prints per day through one machine and calculate how long the ink will last you. This will tell you how frequently you will need to purchase new ink cartridges and how much you will need to budget per month.

Paper

In the same vein, you should also factor in the cost of paper. Predict how much each employee prints and calculate the figures for a month. If you have no idea how much each person in your company is using the printer, it could be a good idea to give each person a number of printer credits per month to get an estimate of how much the machine is being used. Another step is to keep the printer paper in your office, this way you can see how many paper packs you go through per week or month and estimate the costs efficiently.

Duty cycle

In the manufacturer's documents there should be something that tells you what the printer's duty cycle is. This means how many pages the machine should reliably be able to produce before it needs replacing. It is important to factor this into your budget when you are looking for a new machine. You will need to make the decision about whether it is better to pay less for a printer that won't last very long or budget more for a machine that is more expensive but will have greater longevity.

You can also divide the overall cost of the unit by the duty cycle to find a cost per page. It will only be a small amount, but it is important to factor into your business costs.

New parts

You will need to research how much spare parts are and how much your printer will cost to replace. Many manufacturers offer some sort of warranty when you buy a machine, you should weigh up this cost against the price of spare parts and loss of productivity should the printer suddenly break and have to be repaired.

Of course, you will also need to factor into your budget other costs, such as how much electricity the machine will use. You can also estimate how much printing speed will affect your staff productivity if you are a big company. However, the above guide will give you enough of an accurate estimate to ensure that you make a wise choice when purchasing a printer.