PaperCut Pricing. How do you do it!?

[abillybob]

Morning Guys,

 

Just a quick one. I have been given the job of sorting out all the pricing for the printers around the school on PaperCut. Problem is that two of our photocopiers actually cost less than 1p per copy. I think it's around 0.049p per copy.

 

PaperCut won't let me put in anything under than 1p although two of our printers cost around 5p per copy so I even thought about moving the numbers two decimal places and then moving them back when doing reports but because the other two printers are more than 1p they'd be likes in the 10's of pounds.

 

Ugh. Do you guys just round the numbers up to nearest penny?

 

Thanks

[localzuk]

Have you taken into account paper and printer lease costs in your cost per click figure?

 

When I figure those in, it easily hits a penny.

[MatthewL]

By the time you add your lease cost in, the paper, and electricity the cost is a lot more than 1p. I use realistic prices of 2 or 3p for mono, 10 times more for colour and then the A3 is double that.

[Steve21]

2p BW and 6p Colour (Taking into account printing costs, paper, people changing stuff etc)

 

Steve

[Narwhal]

You can charge fractions of a penny in papercut. Go to options and scroll down to Display options. Tick 'change number of decimal places'

[Marshall_IT]

If i remember correctly you can do it but i think you have to remove the currency or change it to dollars. We needed it doing in our setup as we put a discount on duplex which couldn't be applied without being able to do less than 1p.

 

I can't remember the exact setup as it was installed and configured by our supplier, but it is possible.

[abillybob]

Thanks peeps

Problem is we have bought the printer outright so no lease. I was going to factor this cost in as we expect the copier to last 5 years and take the figures of how much we print per year and divide that per the number of copies to see how much that would be but I was told not to do this and we didn't want to include electricity.

 

Do you think this is what we should do?

[Steve21]

If you don't include anything like operating costs, electric, supplies etc, it's kind of just picking any random number and going with it as you'll be losing per print anyway.

 

End of day it's no difference to a little printer, you don't charge per ink, it's per "print" etc

 

Steve

[Scotbynature]

A true "per print" cost is what it costs for everything you need to produce that printed copy. Also, it really depends what you want it for? We only use costing to make the teachers think about the amount they print so I set it artificially a little on the high side so their credits run out quicker. The real value for us is the reporting that I produce for SLT on a monthly basis showing number of prints per user/printer/department. This then strikes up a conversation with heads of departments about where their budgets are being used up.

[abillybob]

Big thank you guys! I'll have a chat with the LM about it all and find out what it exactly we want to do with all your suggestions in mind!

[clockend25]

Our prices directly reflect the costs in our lease agreement. As we don't actually bill faculties/departments it's basically just there to allow us to see what the next quarterly bill is going to be, so we don't factor in any additional costs.

[sted]

personally I just use relative costs so if it a printer I want people to use I make it cheap if its one that id rather they didn't I just whack it up to discourage use rather than reflect actual printing costs

[Soulfish]

I've previously set PaperCut up to generate monthly accounts that went out to the heads of department and director of finance. Those costs came out of each departments budget, so we factored in total IT cost for the per print price (paper, cost per click, PaperCut costs etc) and were typically charging 1-2p/mono side and 20p/colour side. For us the costings for A3 and A4 were the same as cost per click and paper were the same.

 

Costs for the central reprographics machines were probably 25% cheaper than the other floor level MFDs to encourage large jobs to go there instead.

[ITGURU]

Our Copier/ Papercut provider set our MFPs at 2p mono, 5p colour.

For our standard laser printers they said a fair cost would be 4p mono, 10p black to encourage them to use the new copiers.

 

As toners were charged to the department, they said they would pay for whatever is cheaper! The Pence per page, or the cost of the toner!

[DalekSec]

1p For Mono

7p For Colour

 

Across all networked printers.

[Copymore]

I would suggest that you take the lease monthly cost (or purchase, less depreciation divided by life of equipment months) and divide this by the number of pages produced per month. For example a 30 page per minute networked colour A3 device should be around £72 per month and if you produce 15000 pages it works out to £0.0048 (£72/15000=0.0048). If you add this to your service charge of ay 0.4p mono (£0.004) and 4p colour (£0.04), then your running cost for the equipment and service should be set at 0.88p mono (£0.0088) and 4.48p for colour (£0.0448). On top of this you will need to factor paper cost which at £2 per ream is around 0.4p (£0.004), which would equate to a total cost per page of 1.2p for mono (£0.012) and 4.88p for colour (£0.0488) On top of this you need to factor energy costs (which very much depends on the equipments TEC rating) and staff costs. These are only approximate figures and you may well be paying more or less for your equipment, service and paper. If you set the papercut to pop up asking if the document could be duplexed, you will save the paper cost and if it has to be colour, the saving will be greater. Feel free to ask for any further advice.