Why an Old (Paid Off) Copier Can Easily Be Costing You More Than a New One
I recently received a call from an organization in Northern Virginia. Someone in the organization had been reading this blog and contacted me because they were curious if there was any way they could get a new copier for anywhere near what they were paying for their existing copier.
The copier they had was an older Cannon Image Runner that printed/copied at 20 pages per minute in black only and had very few of the features that are available today. The copier was donated to them several years ago (already used) and had been serving them well but they wanted a little to see if they could upgrade to a newer, better copier(maybe even a color copier) for anywhere near what they were currently paying.
The service contract was about to renew for another 12 months and the existing copier company was asking this organization to pay$1,750.00 for 35,000 black copies/prints for the following 12 months. That’s 5 cents per black print/copy. OUCH!!!
5 cents per black copy/print is VERY expensive.
In the existing copier companies defense the Cannon is very old and probably very inefficient in it’s toner use. But 5 cents still seems high.
After asking a lot of questions and making sure I understood their needs I created a proposal for this organization complete with full cost analysis comparing what they have now to what I’m offering.
I have cut and pasted below that actual Cost Savings Analysis I included in the is customers proposal.
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Copier Cost Savings Analysis
Current Situation
XXXXXX currently has a Cannon ImageRunner 1021F which prints and copies at 20 pages per minute.
The cost for a new 12 month service agreement from your existing vendor, which includes 35,000 black copies/prints, would be $1,750.00.
Proposed Solution
ABS-Toshiba is proposing a brand new Toshiba e Studio 2050c color copier.
The lease payment will be $92.43 per month for 39 months for the new
Toshiba e-Studio 2050c.
The service plan for the Toshiba would be $784.00 per year ($65.33 per month) for 7,000 color and 28,000 black copies/prints.
The total cost for lease and service would be $157.76 per month or $1,893.12 per year if choosing a 39 month lease.
Conclusion
XXXXXXXXX can upgrade to a brand new Toshiba color copier with more capabilities for $143.12 per year or $11.93 per month more than you are now paying for the Cannon when choosing a 39 month lease.
If you were to choose a 48 month lease you would be paying $91.52 per year or $7.63 per month more than you are paying now for the Cannon.
** If you were to choose a 60 month lease you would SAVE $230.56 per year or $19.21 per month compared to the Cannon.**
Further savings will be realized by using less paper due to duplexing (2 sided printing) capabilities of the Toshiba.
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The bottom line is that this organization could get a brand new Toshiba color copier for LESS money per month provided they go with a 60 month lease.
Keep in mind we are comparing the total cost of ownership of an old Cannon copier that prints/copies only black to a brand new Toshiba color machine with far more time and money saving features.
They can cut their paper budget by at lease 30% because the old machine doesn’t do two sided printing so every time they print a 2 page document they are forced to use 2 pieces of paper. A 4 page document now requires 4 pieces of paper where their new Toshiba e-Studio 2050c would only require 2 pieces of paper.
You get the idea.
What’s even more impressive is that if they were to lease a Toshiba e-Studio 206L, which is the true equivalent model of to what they have now (20 pages per minute black copier), saving would be considerably more.
I’ve pasted the conclusion of the Cost Savings Analysis for our equivalent model below.
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XXXXXX can upgrade to a brand new Toshiba copier with more capabilities for less money (including lease & service) than you are now paying for the Cannon.
The total savings realized would $423.88 per year when choosing a 39 month lease.
The total savings realized would $471.61 per year when choosing a 48 month lease.
The total savings realized would $769.60 per year when choosing a 60 month lease.
Further savings will be realized by using less paper due to duplexing (2 sided printing) capabilities of the Toshiba.
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It’s an understandable misconception. Most organizations (businesses, churches. nonprofits, ect) assume that because their copier is paid off that they are saving money over leasing or buying a new one.
The reality of MANY cases like this is that I can provide them a brand new Toshiba copier for less money (including lease AND service) than they are paying now. Sometimes substantially less.
If your organization is located in Maryland, Washington DC, or Northern Virginia or Deleware and you would like a competitive quote from a copier salesperson who will always tell you the truth, please fill out the quick easy form below and I would be glad to help.
If you are anywhere else in the United States and would like my recommendation for copier companies in your local area fill out the form below and I’ll get back to you asap.
My company carries Toshiba Copiers, HP & Lexmark Printers, Fujitsu Scanners and Dahle Professional Shredders.
In addition to the hardware listed above we provide software and services such as Managed Print Services, IT/Network Services and a full line of document management software.
If you have a general copier buying question or would like a free copy of my book, The Ultimate Copier Buying Guide, just fill out the form below. Thanks for stopping by. Come back often and most of all…… HAVE FUN!
Ed Worthington
Should You Include Maintenance Plan Costs In Your Copier Lease?
Recently I met with a prospective copier lease customer located here in Baltimore, Maryland.
The company is what I would consider a mid-sized manufacturing business with 200 employees.
They have 3 copiers and 3 large commercial color printers at their facility.
During our initial meeting I asked the CFO of the company how his billing was set up with his current copier vendor and he informed me that everything was included in his lease.
By everything he meant that the copiers, the printers and the maintenance agreement for all of them were all rolled into one lease.
Just to be clear, when I say maintenance agreement/plan I’m speaking of an agreement that covers toner, all service and repairs as well as preventative maintenance. Basically everything except paper and staples for the copiers and printers.
When I asked the CFO if he’d ever considered having the maintenance agreement billed separately from the lease he looked puzzled.
I explained to him that he was paying interest/leasing fees on the maintenance agreement and that he really didn’t have to do that.
I further explained that all copier companies will bill you separately for your maintenance agreement and that keeps you from paying leasing fees on your copier maintenance plan.
I told him that many copier companies don’t actually hold your lease in-house but instead send it to an outside company. In these cases the leasing company sends you the lease invoice each month for the lease and the copier company will send you the bill for the maintenance plan because they are the ones providing the maintenance.
Then what the CFO said next had me puzzled. He said he likes to keep the copiers, printers and maintenance together in the same lease so he doesn’t have to write 2 checks every month. Huh?
This business does a fairly significant amount of printing and copying so they are paying A LOT of money unnecessarily.
Unlike this CFO many businesses who have the cost of maintenance rolled into their copier lease don’t understand that they’re paying leasing fees on the copier maintenance agreement.
I’ve even had prospective customers tell me that the sales rep of their current vendor told them that there are no fees whatsoever associated with putting maintenance into the lease.
That sounds like a bunch of poo poo to me. There could be many reasons a copier salesperson is encouraging you to do this but my bet is that it benefits the salesperson to do so.
One possibility is that the copier company actually holds the lease in-house and by rolling maintenance plan costs into the lease they make increased profits on that maintenance. Therefore the copier company may be giving the sales rep an increased commission for putting the maintenance costs into the lease.
If the leasing company (whether in-house or not) is allowing you to have maintenance costs rolled into your copier lease they are charging you for the privilege one way or another.
They are leasing companies, not charities. They didn’t get to be the incredibly profitable entities they are by lending money to businesses for free.
It seemed to me that this CFO was costing his company a boatload of money for the convenience of writing one check per month instead of two. Heck, most copier companies will bill you quarterly or even annually for maintenance so you really don’t even have to write a maintenance check every month.
My advice is to have your maintenance agreement billed separately to avoid unnecessary costs to your business.
If your business is located in Maryland, Washington DC, or Northern Virginia and you would like a competitive quote from a copier salesperson who will tell you the truth (even when it hurts), please fill out the quick easy form below and I would be glad to help.
If you are anywhere else in the United States and would like my recommendation for copier companies in your local area fill out the form below and I’ll get back to you asap.
As always you can also ask me any copier buying question you like and I’ll do my best to give you a solid answer.
Thanks for stopping by. Have fun.
Ed Worthington. edworthington@outlook.com. 443-570-0414
How to Cancel a Copier Lease- Sample Letter of Intent to Cancel Copier Lease
If you are leasing a copier for your business, professional practice or non-profit than your lease will no doubt have a specific term attached to it. A term simply means the length of the lease. Most copier lease terms are either 36, 48 or 60 months.
Most people believe that if they don’t want to keep the copier that the leasing company will contact them at the end of the lease and they can just send it back.
That’s where the mistake is made.
The leasing company usually will not contact you at the end of the lease and if you don’t send them a “letter of intent” to discontinue (cancel, terminate) the lease they will keep billing you the same monthly payment you’ve been from the beginning.
I’ve personally seen a real life case where a medical practice located in Westminster, Maryland (a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland) paid on their copier for an extra 4 years after the original lease ended.
With the amount of money they paid over the 7 years the could have literally bought 3 copiers. All because they failed to understand when their lease actually ended and what their responsibility was if they wanted to end the copier lease.
Whether you want to send the copier back at the end of the lease or you want to purchase the copier from the leasing company you must send them a letter of intent to terminate or purchase during the time widow specified in the lease you signed. That time window varies by leasing company but typically is something like, “no later than 60 days before the lease ends but no sooner than 120 days before the lease ends”.
You may be wondering why you have to send a letter of intent to terminate a copier lease if it ends on a specific date anyway. That’s because in the eyes of the leasing company the lease isn’t over until they receive your letter of intent within the specified time window.
It gets worse. With some leasing companies if they don’t receive your letter of intent in time they may not only keep billing you the same monthly payment but they may renew your lease for a full year.
So if you were to discover that your lease ended 3 months ago and you contact the leasing company thinking you can just end it now you’ll be in for a rude awakening. If you want to terminate the lease after this full year automatic renewal has happened than the leasing company will say, “no problem, you just have to buyout out the remaining months plus a few early termination fees to boot”.
To make this magical journey even more fun guess what happens if you were to forget to send in the letter of intent during the specified time window at the end of your one year automatic renewal? You guessed it, you get to spend another exciting full year paying the wonderful leasing company.
The moral of this story is two-fold: 1) know when your copier lease ends and 2) send in your letter of intent during the time window specified by the leasing company or else you’ll regret it.
If your wondering what a letter of intent should say then click on the link below for a template. Just fill in your info and send it off. I would recommend certified mail. 🙂
Letter Of Intent To Terminate Lease
If your organization is located in the Baltimore, Maryland, Washington DC or Northern Virginia metro areas please contact me to receive a competitive quote about 6 months before your current lease ends. It never hurts to get a competitive quote. It tends to keep your current vendor honest.
My company carries Toshiba Copiers, HP & Lexmark Printers, Fujitsu Scanners and Dahle Professional Shredders.
In addition to the hardware listed above we provide software and services such as Managed Print Services, IT/Network Services and a full line of document management software.
If you have a general copier buying question or would like a free copy of my book, The Ultimate Copier Buying Guide, just fill out the form below. Thanks for stopping by. Come back often and most of all…… HAVE FUN!
Copier Data Security: Prevent Copier Identity Theft: A Guide for Business
One question that I constantly get from my clients is how to secure the sensitive data on their copier.
I recently discovered this guide online and I thought that it was great information.
Please read this carefully and apply it to your business as best you can.
Copier Data Security: A Guide for Businesses
Federal Trade Commission | business.ftc.gov
Does your company keep sensitive data — Social Security numbers, credit reports, account numbers, health records, or business secrets? If so, then you’ve probably instituted safeguards to protect that information, whether it’s stored in computers or on paper. That’s not only good business, but may be required by law.
According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation’s consumer protection agency, your information security plans also should cover the digital copiers your company uses. If the data on your copiers gets into the wrong hands, it could lead to fraud and identity theft.
Digital Copiers are Computers
Commercial copiers have come a long way. Today’s generation of networked multifunction devices — known as “digital copiers” — are “smart” machines that are used to copy, print, scan, fax and email documents. Digital copiers require hard disk drives to manage incoming jobs and workloads, and to increase the speed of production. But not every copier on the market is digital: generally, copiers intended for business have hard drives, while copiers intended for personal or home office use do not.
The hard drive in a digital copier stores data about the documents it copies, prints, scans, faxes or emails. If you don’t take steps to protect that data, it can be stolen from the hard drive, either by remote access or by extracting the data once the drive has been removed.
Digital copiers store different types of information in different ways. For example, photocopied images are more difficult to access directly from the hard drive than documents that are faxed, scanned or printed on the copier.
The Life-Cycle of a Copier
Copiers often are leased, returned, and then leased again or sold. It’s important to know how to secure data that may be retained on a copier hard drive, and what to do with a hard drive when you return a leased copier or dispose of one you own.
It’s wise to build in data security for each stage of your digital copier’s life-cycle: when you plan to acquire a device, when you buy or lease, while you use it, and when you turn it in or dispose of it.
Before you acquire a copier:
Make sure it’s included in your organization’s information security policies. Copiers should be managed and maintained by your organization’s IT staff. Employees who have expertise and responsibility for securing your computers and servers also should have responsibility for securing data stored on your digital copiers.
When you buy or lease a copier:
Evaluate your options for securing the data on the device. Most manufacturers offer data security features with their copiers, either as standard equipment or as optional add-on kits. Typically, these features involve encryption and overwriting.
Encryption is the scrambling of data using a secret code that can be read only by particular software. Digital copiers that offer encryption encode the data stored on the hard drive so that it cannot be retrieved even if the hard drive is removed from the machine.
Overwriting — also known as file wiping or shredding — changes the values of the bits on the disk that make up a file by overwriting existing data with random characters. By overwriting the disk space that the file occupied, its traces are removed, and the file can’t be reconstructed as easily.
Depending on the copier, the overwriting feature may allow a user to overwrite after every job run, periodically to clean out the memory, or on a preset schedule. Users may be able to set the number of times data is overwritten — generally, the more times the data is overwritten, the safer it is from being retrieved. However, for speed and convenience, some printers let you save documents (for example, a personnel leave slip) and print them straight from the printer hard drive without having to retrieve the file from your computer. For copiers that offer this feature, the memory is not overwritten with the rest of the memory. Users should be aware that these documents are still available.
Overwriting is different from deleting or reformatting. Deleting data or reformatting the hard drive doesn’t actually alter or remove the data, but rather alters how the hard drive finds the data and combines it to make files: The data remains and may be recovered through a variety of utility software programs.
Yet another layer of security that can be added involves the ability to lock the hard drives using a passcode; this means that the data is protected, even if the drive is removed from the machine.
Finally, think ahead to how you will dispose of the data that accumulates on the copier over time. Check that your lease contract or purchase agreement states that your company will retain ownership of all hard drives at end-of-life, or that the company providing the copier will overwrite the hard drive.
When you use the copier:
Take advantage of all its security features. Securely overwrite the entire hard drive at least once a month.
If your current device doesn’t have security features, think about how you will integrate the next device you lease or purchase into your information security plans. Plan now for how you will dispose of the copier securely. For example, you may want to consider placing a sticker or placard on the machine that says: “Warning: this copier uses a hard drive that must be physically destroyed before turn-in or disposal.” This will inform users of the security issues, and remind them of the appropriate procedures when the machine reaches the end of its usable life.
In addition, your organization’s IT staff should make sure digital copiers connected to your network are securely integrated. Just like computers and servers that store sensitive information, networked copiers should be protected against outside intrusions and attacks.
When you finish using the copier:
Check with the manufacturer, dealer, or servicing company for options on securing the hard drive. The company may offer services that will remove the hard drive and return it to you, so you can keep it, dispose of it, or destroy it yourself. Others may overwrite the hard drive for you. Typically, these services involve an additional fee, though you may be able to negotiate for a lower cost if you are leasing or buying a new machine.
One cautionary note about removing a hard drive from a di gital copier on your own: hard drives in digital copiers often include required firmware that enables the device to operate. Removingand destroying the hard drive without being able to replace the firmware can render the machine inoperable, which may present problems if you lease the device. Also, hard drives aren’t always easy to find, and some devices may have more than one. Generally, it is advisable to work with skilled technicians rather than to remove the hard drive on your own.
For More Information
To learn more about securing sensitive data, in general, read Protecting Personal Information: A Guide for Business at ftc.gov/infosecurity.
The FTC works for the consumer to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair practices in the marketplace and to provide information to businesses to help them comply with the law. To file a complaint or to get free information on consumer issues, visit ftc.gov or call toll-free, 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357); TTY: 1-866-653-4261. Watch a new video, How to File a Complaint, at ftc.gov/video to learn more. The FTC enters consumer complaints into the Consumer Sentinel Network, a secure online database and investigative tool used by hundreds of civil and criminal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad.
Opportunity to Comment
The National Small Business Ombudsman and 10 Regional Fairness Boards collect comments from small businesses about federal compliance and enforcement activities. Each year, the Ombudsman evaluates the conduct of these activities and rates each agency’s responsiveness to small businesses. Small businesses can comment to the Ombudsman without fear of reprisal. To comment, call toll-free 1-888-REGFAIR (1-888-734-3247) or go to sba.gov/ombudsman.
Protecting Sensitive Information: Your Legal Responsibility
The FTC’s standard for information security recognizes that businesses have a variety of needs and emphasizes flexibility: Companies must maintain reasonable procedures to protect sensitive information. Whether your security practices are reasonable depends on the nature and size of your business, the types of information you have, the security tools available to you based on your resources, and the risks you are likely to face.
Depending on the information your business stores, transmits, or receives, you also may have more specific compliance obligations. For example, if you receive consumer information, like credit reports or employee background screens, you may be required to follow the Disposal Rule, which requires a company to properly dispose of any such information stored on its digital copier, just as it would properly dispose of paper information or information stored on computers. Similarly, financial institutions may be required to follow the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Safeguards Rule, which requires a security plan to protect the confidentiality and integrity of personal consumer information, including information stored on digital copiers.
business.ftc.gov
Finally, A Copier That Uses Erasable Toner. Use the Same Piece of Paper 5 Times!
Toshiba has just announced a new copier that uses an erasable toner.
The Toshiba e-Studio 306LP can use same piece of paper up to 5 times!
Image the cost savings and reduced environmental impact for your company.
If you are interested in this revolutionary copier contact me by phone, email or by filling out the simple form below.
You can take a look at the brochure below.
Ed Worthington 443-570-0414 ed@edworthington.com
