How to Calculate the Actual Per Print Cost of Your Copier

Pay per print environments is especially confused that how they can determine their actual per print cost so they can offer printing services at a reasonable price that should save them revenue. Most of the people calculate this expense with the use of toner cartridge and copier page only, but that is not the perfect method as you neglect the copying cost that results in a loss when you run the pay per print system for a long run. In this blog post, we will learn how to calculate the actual per print cost of your copier so you can set the pricing accordingly, while it is also beneficial for offices to keep track of their printing expenses.

Copier Printing Cost

1. Copier Price

The actual price of the copier and its maintenance charges are the most neglected expenses that offices often forget to add while calculating their per print cost. This is the first step to calculate the actual per print cost of your office. In this step, you not only add the actual price of your copier but also include the maintenance charges and call charges that you make during filing the complaints.

For instance, let’s take a copier that costs $200, now add $10 for the complaints filing & courier charges, and add $40 on account of maintenance charges that sums up to $250. Now to calculate the impact of these expenses on per page print, divide the copier amount with the duty cycle of the copier machine. Let’s say the average duty cycle of our assumed copier is 10,000 pages so the per print cost impact can be calculated as; take the total cost of copier and divide it with the duty cycle so in our case that would look like, $250 divided by 10,000 = $0.025. So this is the amount that you will add in every per print cost to calculate the actual printing expense of your office.

2. Toner Cartridge

Printing ink is the consumable that you need to replace regularly to keep your printing process continuous. To measure the impact of toner cartridge replacement on per print can easily be calculated by dividing the actual cost of the toner cartridge with its yield. For instance, let’s take a toner cartridge that costs $100 and offers the yield of 2,100 pages. So in this scenario, the per print expense would be $100 divided by 2,100 = $0.047 that you should include while calculating per print cost.

3. Printing Paper

Printing paper is the last item that adds up to the printing expenses. You can calculate the per printing paper cost by dividing its cost with the total number of pages available in the box. For instance, let’s assume that there are 1,000 pages in the box and it costs $20, then our per paper cost would be $20 divided by 1,000 = $0.02.
Now, you have all the values so now you are able to calculate the actual per print cost by adding up all the calculated values that would be;

Copier pricing ($0.025) + Toner cost ($0.047) + Paper expense ($0.02) = Actual per print cost ($0.092)
In this way, you can calculate the actual per print cost of your print. Now apply this method to calculate the print cost of your office and you would be amazed by the accuracy of its results that will help you to keep track of your printing expenses.