Supply and servicing contracts for printers and copiers are an increasingly necessity for medium and large offices but, let’s be honest, too often people have felt tripped up on confusion, ambiguous or absent terms. Third party printer supply and service contracts differ widely, with some terms and conditions more bad than good for your organisation, so it’s important to keep abreast of the latest printer supplier contract caveats and the old-hat tricks to all-out avoid!
We spend a lot of time walking through these areas with prospects, so we’re more than happy to share our top things to watch out for the next time you're negotiating the details in your printer supplier contract.
This is the first installment of our Printer Supplier Contract Caveats series. We hope you find it helpful!
- Over inflated contracted copy / print volumes
A word of advice would be to get an idea of your monthly current copy / print volumes. This can be done by finding out how many prints / copies have been made on your machine and divide it by the amount of months that you own the machine. Many suppliers will look to sell a machine and an agreed about of prints per month. If you only make 1000 prints per month you do not want to sign up to a contract whereby you are paying for 5000 prints per month.
- ‘Cost-per-Copy from 2 Cent’
This is a new one – but thread very carefully! It seems like a very tempting offer from the outset as it leads you to believe that you can achieve super low cost reductions on your colour printing. What this actually means is that you are charged for exactly how much colour is printed on each page that you run through your printer. This means that a customer’s costs could also increase to many times the 2 cent per page offered. 2 Cent per colour page may only allow you 1% toner coverage on your page. Most cost-per-page colour offerings are closer to 5-8 cent per page. This is usually based on a 5% toner page coverage. But this is more than often not checked closely, whereas at 2 cent a page every page over 1 % toner coverage will be billed at increased rate with no cap. As a general rule of thumb, if it says ‘cost from’, then dig deep into the detail to make sure you understand the particulars specifically.
- Always ask how long a contact is in place!
You need to know exactly how long you are tied in to your supplier and what the exit conditions are should you feel you need to move on. Printer supplier contracts are generally in place for three to five years, but it’s important to understand the length of term of contract from the outset so that you know what you’re signing up for. Make sure you eradicate any ambiguity here also regarding service terms in that contract duration. Some contract set ups can imply full service terms apply for the entire duration, others may try to wane off their level of commitment as the machines age, which is likely when you’ll need the most support (repairs, machine part replacements)!
- Do the costs-per-print seem incredibly cheap?a
If something sounds too good to be true, or is sold as a once-off offer, there unfortunately is, more often than not, a catch involved. Very low print cost contacts almost always have heavy penalties in the small print of the contract. If the margin is cut right out of the supplier’s bread and butter line to make a sale, they’ll look elsewhere to make some money. Whether it be penalties for printing over any agreed volume of prints or, more commonly of late, penalties for the amount of toner being printed on a page, you need to check the fine print. There is a general rule that 5% page coverage with regard to toner is what a customer agrees to when singing up for a contract. But given that this is not always monitored too closely by suppliers…
We hope you found the first installment of our Printer Supplier Contract Caveats series of benefit. If you've any questions you'd like to ask us, feel free to email us at info@pcigroup.ie.
Our next post in this series will follow in the next few days!
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