Caution: Know This Before You Buy

Before our customers start receiving proposals or getting shiny brochures and visiting showrooms, we tell them to understand how they will acquire their equipment. Will you purchase the copier or lease it? With technology changing so rapidly, there are advantages of leasing over owning. Today’s innovation will be tomorrow’s routine. Within two years, a lot of office technology loses its value.

In some cases, you have to be as careful with buying as you do with leasing. We have heard as many horror stories with customers who bought a copier as with leasing. You have to do your research beforehand. Some customers will tell us that they only pay $.008 cents per page, but that is not true. For example, if you buy a black and white multifunctional copier for $10,000 and 10,000 pages each month and the cost per page related to service and maintenance is .01 per page, then you are not getting as good as a deal as you think. You are actually paying a total cost of $0.0166 for equipment. The bottom line is that you should never let yourself be oversold on more than what you will need. This eats into your profits. Before you buy or lease, compare the two options to make sure that they make the most sense financially.