https://sosny.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/ck-77-1.jpg 1333 2000 Nate Riggins /wp-content/uploads/2025/11/SOS-Logo-Color-New.png Nate Riggins2020-01-02 22:37:412026-05-18 20:31:24AwardsAt a Glance:
- Your true managed print services cost includes four categories, but most NYC businesses track only one: the equipment lease or service contract
- Among the most significant hidden cost categories are staff time spent managing print issues and unscheduled equipment downtime
- Managed print services pricing is typically expressed as a cost-per-page rate that bundles equipment, service, and supplies into a single number
- Consolidating from multiple print vendors to one provider with a single invoice is a quantifiable cost reduction, not just a billing convenience
Step 1: Build Your True Cost-Per-Page Baseline
Cost per page printing is the most useful single number in a managed print analysis, and it is one that most businesses have never actually calculated. To find it, pull together every print-related cost from the last 12 months:
- Equipment lease or purchase payments
- All service and maintenance contracts
- Toner, ink, paper, and supply purchases, including emergency orders
- Any per-call or per-visit service fees not covered by a contract
Add those figures together to get your total annual print spend. Then retrieve your total annual page output. Most networked multifunction devices log this in the machine meter, accessible from the control panel or admin interface. Your current service provider can often pull this from monitoring data if you have an active contract.
Divide total spend by total pages. That is your current cost per page. For a 20-to-30-person NYC office with a mix of black-and-white and color printing, this number regularly surprises decision-makers when they run it for the first time. The math is not complicated. The issue is that no one has gathered all the inputs before.
Step 2: Add the Costs That Don’t Appear on Any Invoice
The managed print services cost comparison only holds up when both sides of the ledger are fully loaded. The categories that change the analysis most significantly are the ones no vendor invoice captures:
Staff time. Count how many hours per month your team spends troubleshooting printer errors, tracking down service calls, placing supply orders before toner runs out, and managing communication with multiple print vendors. In most small-to-midsize NYC offices, this time is absorbed by an office manager or operations lead. It is real cost, and the calculation should treat it that way.
Equipment downtime. When a printer goes down without a proactive monitoring and response plan, work stops. Estimate the frequency and average duration of downtime events over the past year and assign an hourly cost based on your team’s time. For legal, financial, and other document-intensive businesses, a single extended outage can justify the service model of managed print on its own.
Multi-vendor overhead. If your copier lease, supply orders, and service calls go to different vendors, your team processes separate invoices, manages separate service relationships, and reconciles discrepancies across accounts every billing cycle. Consolidating to a single office solutions provider makes that overhead visible and eliminates it. It belongs in your calculation.
Step 3: Run the Managed Print Comparison
Once your current cost is fully loaded, the comparison is straightforward. A managed print services proposal should give you a contracted cost-per-page rate that bundles equipment use, supplies, and service into one number, plus automatic supply replenishment based on equipment monitoring and a bundled service agreement covering on-site response rather than per-call billing.
To build the comparison, multiply the managed print cost-per-page rate by your actual annual page volume. Add any equipment lease cost if it is billed separately. Then subtract the value of the hidden costs from Step 2 that a managed print model eliminates: the unmonitored supply spend, the multi-vendor management time, and the downtime events that proactive monitoring reduces.
Illustrative Example (apply your own usage data; figures below are for illustration only):
Consider a 25-person NYC office currently managing three separate vendor relationships: one for the equipment lease, one for supply orders, and one for service calls. Equipment and service costs arrive as separate line items under separate contracts. Toner is ordered reactively, which means someone is manually tracking levels and placing orders when stock runs low. When the machine goes down, the office calls a repair vendor and pays per visit. At the end of the month, accounts payable reconciles invoices from all three.
Under a managed print agreement, a single cost-per-page rate bundles all three into one number. Supplies auto-replenish based on equipment monitoring before they run out. Service response is covered under the agreement rather than billed per call. One invoice arrives at the end of the month.
The comparison is not just the monthly line item. It is what your team stops spending time and attention on.
The most useful version of this analysis uses your actual data, not industry averages.
How Superior Office Solutions Runs This Analysis
Superior Office Solutions runs a No-Cost Analysis that replaces the illustrative numbers above with the actual figures from your current print environment. SOS pulls your usage data, right-sizes equipment to your actual volume rather than an over-provisioned contract, and produces a direct comparison showing what you’re paying now versus what a managed print agreement from SOS would cost. The lease and service bill out on a single invoice, supplies auto-replenish based on equipment monitoring so manual orders are no longer necessary, and SOS’s service team responds directly to service calls rather than adding per-event billing. Superior Office Solutions has held a BBB A+ rating for more than 20 years and has earned the Canon Top Dealer Award every year since 2015.
Frequently Asked Questions About Managed Print Services ROI
What is a good cost per page for office printing?
Cost-per-page benchmarks vary by device type, volume, and print mix. Black-and-white printing costs significantly less per page than color, and devices running at higher monthly volumes tend to have lower effective cost-per-page rates than lightly used machines. Running your own current cost-per-page calculation, as outlined in Step 1 above, gives you a real baseline to compare against any managed print proposal rather than relying on a generic industry average that may not reflect your environment.
Does managed print make sense for smaller offices?
The ROI case is often strongest for offices that lack the scale to negotiate favorable supply pricing on their own, or the administrative capacity to manage multiple vendor relationships efficiently. For a 10-to-30-person NYC office, the combination of auto-replenishment, bundled service response, and single-invoice billing often delivers measurable savings without requiring any dedicated print management staff.
What’s the difference between managed print services and just leasing a copier?
A copier lease covers the equipment. Managed print services covers the equipment, the service agreement, the supplies, and the monitoring, structured into a single cost-per-page rate. A lease alone still leaves supply procurement, service calls, and billing across vendors as separate cost centers. See our breakdown of managed print services vs. copier leasing for a full comparison of what each model includes and when each makes sense.
What if my current copier lease isn’t up yet?
SOS can buy out an existing lease and roll the remaining obligation into a new agreement, which means the cost-per-page analysis is worth running now rather than waiting until your contract end date. If your current environment is significantly overpriced, waiting out the lease can cost more than the buyout. The No-Cost Analysis accounts for the remaining lease obligation so you can see the full picture before making a decision.
The Real Number Is in the Hidden Costs
The managed print services ROI calculation is not complicated once you’ve gathered the right inputs. Most businesses who run it find that the gap between what they’re paying and what they would pay under a managed program is larger than expected, because the hidden costs are the ones no one has been tracking. Superior Office Solutions offers a No-Cost Analysis that runs this comparison using your actual usage data. Contact SOS to schedule yours.
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