What Is the Total Cost of Ownership of an Office Laser Printer or Photocopier?

What the quoted figure leaves out

Two offices sign near-identical contracts for near-identical machines. By the end of the term one has spent noticeably more than the other. The contracts were the same; how the machines were used and looked after was different.

A quote prices the machine and the service agreement, which is what a quote is for. It cannot price how the printer will be used or looked after. The variables inside the quote itself are covered in what a photocopier lease costs.

Cost per page, and why the purchase price is only part of it

Cost per page is the price of the toner divided by the number of pages the manufacturer rates it for, at standard coverage. Work it out separately for mono and colour, because a colour page costs several times more than a mono one. A machine that is cheap to buy can be dear to run if its toner yields are low. Under managed print services you pay a fixed cost per page instead, with toner included and dispatched before you run out.

Print volume is what turns cost per page into a monthly number. The more you print, the more the running cost outweighs the machine, and the more it matters that the printer suits your volume.

Outside the invoice

What never shows up as a line item

Paper, toner beyond the plan and the time spent chasing consumables never appear as a single line on an invoice. They build up the way the files on the shelf do. Check what is bundled against what you use before you sign.

1. Downtime

When a printer is down, the bill that matters is the people working around it: the client document that went out late, the afternoon a job waited. In a one-machine office there is nothing to work around to, so a day down is a day without printing.

This is the largest hidden cost in most small offices and the one nobody records, because it never generates an invoice. That is why average repair time is worth asking about as a number. With us, faults are fixed in hours, not days: the average repair takes 3.2 hours, and emergency response across Sydney metro is under four hours.

2. Admin time

Ordering toner, logging faults, chasing a technician, checking invoices. In a small office it usually falls to one person, often the practice manager or office manager, on top of their real job. An hour a week across the term is a real number.

It grows quietly when desktop printers creep in beside the main machine. In our published work with a Sydney medical practice, toner for 20 desktop printers was being bought as needed across three sites, so nobody knew what printing cost. One agreement and one invoice removes most of this, which is the practical case for managed print in a medical practice.

The invisible line item

When printers are bought as they break

At a Cherrybrook pharmacy we worked with, printers were bought from office supply stores as each one failed, and each lasted about a year. Their small-yield toners cost more per page, and spares for a broken model were useless for its replacement. Working out what each device really cost identified a 28 per cent reduction. That work is written up under pharmacy.

3. Consumables that sit outside the plan

What is bundled varies by agreement, and paper almost never is. Staples often are not. Under a per-page arrangement toner is typically included and dispatched automatically. Under a hardware lease with a separate service agreement, check. High-yield toner lowers the cost per page, and automatic double-sided printing can roughly halve the paper on multi-page documents.

Which of the three agreement types you are on decides most of this, and the distinction is set out in printer lease contract terms.

4. Maintenance cycles

Drums, fusers and other long-life parts wear out on a schedule measured in pages. Without a service plan those parts and the labour to fit them are a cost every time. Under a service plan they are covered, and preventative maintenance means we service it before it breaks, so quality holds and the printer keeps running between visits.

Without it, a worn part shows up first as streaks and jams, then as a service call, and in a one-machine office that call leaves the whole office waiting.

5. Energy use of a multifunction printer

Electricity is a real but modest line for one or two machines, usually well below consumables and downtime. Compare the Typical Electricity Consumption (TEC) rating on each model's specification sheet, and check the sleep mode. Canon's C3900i series, for example, uses low melting point toner to keep its TEC rating low.

6. Print that is never collected, and the security side

Jobs get sent, someone gets pulled into a meeting, and the pages sit in the tray until they are binned. That is paper, toner and machine wear spent on pages nobody read.

In a practice holding patient or client files it is also an exposure, since those pages sit where anyone can read them, and a breach costs far more than toner. Secure release printing removes most of it, because a job that is never collected is never produced. The mechanics are in office print security.

7. Several machines that no longer match

Once an office runs several machines, bought one at a time from different brands, each has its own consumables, its own service arrangement and its own quirks, and each multiplies the admin. Standardising is where the saving is at that size.

In our published work with an aged care group, 111 machines across 14 facilities came from five brands and 36 models, because each facility was deciding on its own. Moving them onto one plan with four standardised models cut their average monthly print spend by 26 per cent, around $66,000 a year. That work is written up under aged care. The best time to do it is at an upgrade, covered in upgrading a leased printer mid-contract.

8. What happens at the end

Under an operating lease or a managed agreement the machine usually goes back to the provider or the financier. If you own it outright, disposal is yours to arrange, including securely clearing any data held on the device. An owned machine is a depreciating asset with its own treatment at disposal, set out in how ATO depreciation works for office printers and copiers.

Around year three or four of a term, many offices look for a payout and a newer machine at a monthly cost close to what they already pay. We can pay out your existing contract, including one with another provider.

How to work out your own total cost of ownership

1. Start with the contracted monthly figure across the full term.
2. Add consumables outside it. Paper at minimum. Check toner and staples against the agreement itself.
3. Estimate downtime honestly. How many times last year, how long each time, and who could not work.
4. Count the admin. Roughly how many hours a month go on ordering, logging and checking invoices.
5. Check maintenance and energy. Which parts the service plan covers, and the TEC rating of each machine.
6. Estimate uncollected print unless you have secure release set up. Walk past the tray at four o'clock for a week and count.
7. Count the machines and the models, including desktop printers. If those two numbers are far apart, that gap is where the saving is.

It will not be exact, and it will still be far closer than the monthly figure on its own. It usually reorders which quote is the cheapest. The colour ratio is worth pulling at the same time, since it moves the cost per page more than total volume does. That reasoning is in colour or monochrome.

What this looks like in Sydney

Downtime is the cost that varies most by who you are with. Buy direct from a manufacturer and you ring a call centre, somebody logs a ticket, and then you wait. A cheap plan with no service plan behind it carries no warranty and nobody accountable, and an ex-rental machine's saving disappears the first time it goes down.

With us you get the same person every time, and they already know your machines. We have run Axia from Frenchs Forest since 1996 with our own technicians, and we have over 90% customer retention. The hardware runs across the Canon range and the Sharp range, and the terms behind it sit on photocopier and printer leasing in Sydney. Most of what decides your total is settled at signing, which is why the seven questions to ask a provider are worth asking before the number is agreed.

Frequently asked questions