Never bought office equipment? You may be surprised just how difficult it is to find out what it will cost you.
How much should you budget for your new multifunction device? Are you overpaying for the office copier?
Purchasing office equipment can be a nightmare without knowing what a fair price is and what isn’t. While it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how much your new technology will cost in advance, there is no reason you shouldn’t have an approximate idea of what your final quote will look like.
Check out this video for a quick explanation of what office equipment costs, or scroll down for a more detailed breakdown of what to budget for copiers/MFPs, desktop printers and phone systems.
How Much Does a Copier Cost?
Since multifunction devices (MFDs) or copiers can come in a wide variety of sizes, they also fall into quite a wide range of prices. Manufacturers measure their devices by the print speed or Pages Per Minute (ppm). We have used these measurements as benchmarks as it is a reasonably straightforward way to categorize the “size” of a device.
Here are the four main categories of devices we find our customers using and their approximate costs.
25 ppm MFD – $7,500 to $11,000 (4,000 to 7,000 prints per month)
30 ppm MFD – $10,500 to $14,500 (7,000 to 9,000 prints per month)
45 ppm MFD – $12,500 to $18,000 (9,500 to 13,000 prints per month)
60 ppm MFD – $14,000 to $22,000 (14,000 to 20,000 prints per month)
Check out the full article titled How Much Does a Copier Cost for a look into which device category might best fit your needs as well as a deeper explanation on what impacts the final price.
How Much Does A Desktop Printer Cost?
As with standalone MFDs, desktop printers can come in various sizes. However, unlike with MFDs, not all desktop devices are multifunction. Typically, desktop devices fall into two categories:
- A small multifunction printer (MFP) with a range of functionality, including scan, fax, copy and print.
- A printer which is designed to have only one primary function… printing.
Some desktop printers and MFPs are designed with the small or home office (SOHO) specifically in mind, while others are merely scaled-down versions of commercial office copiers and printers. Whether a device was designed for the SOHO or a commercial application can significantly affect its purchase price.
SOHO devices are typically inexpensive to purchase but have a much higher total cost of ownership. On the other hand, commercial devices can be quite expensive to acquire but typically have lower toner and maintenance costs and a longer life expectancy.
As we no longer deal with a single price range, we find it easiest to think about desktop device pricing as a matrix rather than the traditional sliding scale.
| Small or Home Office |
Commercial |
|
| Printer | $250 to $600 |
$3,000+ |
| Multifunction Device | $600 to $1,200 |
$7,500+ |
For a full account as to what impacts the price of desktop devices and which category would suit your office best, read the full article How Much Does a Desktop Printer Cost?
How Much Does an Office Phone System Cost?
Virtually no two phone systems are identical, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be able to forecast approximately how much it will cost. The number one determinant of how much you will end up paying for your new system is how many people are going to be using that system. More employees mean more hardware and a higher cost.
Phone system pricing comprises three factors: hardware, lines and features.
Hardware – Standard desktop phones should cost approximately $350 per phone. However, wireless or other more advanced phones can cost much more. If your phone system is going to be hosted on-premise, you will also require a PBX, which will generally cost around $4500.
Number of Lines – Traditional phone systems require one phone line to be purchased from your telecommunications provider for each unique phone number. These are about $20-50 a line. Alternatively, if you decide to buy a system that runs on SIP lines, which are a shared resource, you may be able to reduce your overall monthly phone bill by up to 30 percent.
Features – Phone systems typically come pre-loaded with a suite of features that you can then scale back if you feel a feature isn’t right for you or the system is getting out of your price range. Some of the most popular features include:
- Unified messaging
- Voicemail-to-email
- Caller queues
- Extension dialling and company directories
- One-button transfer
In our full blog article on the cost of an office phone system, we take these factors and see how they relate to a “typical” small business office. Give it a read for a more in-depth explanation of how these factors combine to create your total price.
Looking For the Cost Of More Office Products?
In our blog series What Does it Cost, you can find more about the cost of office technology used to write this page. The series focuses exclusively on the cost of our office furniture and technology. Or, if you can’t find the answer you are looking for, just reach out and ask! We promise we will get you an answer shortly.
