Printing Price !!

[saajan4u]

Hi All I'm new here..

 

We've just installed our print auditing system ( paperCut) its working great so far ( fingers Crossed)

we have departmental budget set by the bursar. my qyestion is

if you have something similar auditings how do you charge the following..

 

A4 Black and White printed on a desktop printer

A4 Color on Desktop Printer

 

are you including the cost of the paper?

 

also the cost of A4 on an mfd, cost of A3 on an mfd, cost of A4 and A3 colour ect...

 

your help will be greatly appreciated.

 

thanks

[teejay]

The easy way is to buy printers on a contract that are charged at cost per page rather than buying toners and other consumables.

The real life way, most printers will record their page count over time or use paper cut to record this, you then record any consumables you use over that time, get their cost and divide by number of pages. Don't forget to add in extra for long life consumable items like print head, imaging drums etc and also things like electricity etc. I would also look at adding the cost of the printer by estimating lifespan and using an estimate of the total number of pages used.

If that's too much work, look at the costs of the consumables, divide by manufacturers stated number of pages and then double the result as their stated number of pages are always much higher than real life.

If printers are shared between depts, then add in the cost of paper plus an overhead margin for people removing paper from the printers for other use. if for sole use of a dept then you have the option of the dept buying their own paper.

[saajan4u]

that wasn't an option for us unfortunately as much as I loved to.. people are quite set back and wants to have a crappy printer next to them so they don't have to get up get their prints. ( what a tough life)!

[teejay]

When you start charging their department the full cost of printing from a little desktop printer they soon start clamouring for better options

[pete]

We charge based on real cost per page + paper, rounded up to the nearest half pence.

 

This means that (for example) the networked copiers are cheapest, then the network printers and the desktop printers are most expensive. Very few people have or need desktop printers.

 

Depts don't have a printing budget as such, but questions are raised if their printing is spiking above other depts without an obvious reason.

[teejay]

 

Depts don't have a printing budget as such, but questions are raised if their printing is spiking above other depts without an obvious reason.

 

This is one thing I don't understand and is something we changed here. If departments have to buy stationery such as pens, exercise books, paper etc from their department budget then why is printing a special case requiring a special budget?

[IrritableTech]

We charge real costs per sheet, averaged out across all printers (and charge for paper) so there is a flat rate for mono, and colour. This is the case for all printers except for two inkjets which again, charged at real costs.

 

Speak with your reprographics dept. You want to make sure that bulk copying is cheaper on their photocopiers (and probably set limits in papercut). Otherwise you'll close their department, and be replacing toners on a daily basis!

[pete]

This is one thing I don't understand and is something we changed here. If departments have to buy stationery such as pens, exercise books, paper etc from their department budget then why is printing a special case requiring a special budget?

 

IT services are provided centrally, that includes printing. We provide reasonable amounts of printing to students without charge and we do the same for departments. Papercut is set up so that you can't take the michael (it'll detect shenanigans and shunt your jobs into a queue that requires admin approval for release, it'll also refuse excessive jobs on printers not designed for it), so we don't have that issue at the moment.