Money saving tip for large format printing

This money saving tip is for those smaller architects, electricians, fire suppression businesses, air conditioning installers or any other small business that has a need to print plans in A0 & A1 size…

Who are currently going down to their local printers and paying anything between £8.00 and £15.00 for every copy. Just, because they haven’t got the available cash flow to pay the £2,000+ price of buying or leasing the latest HP, Canon or Epson A0/A1 floor standing (plotter) printing device.

We recently came across a small architects based near Manchester, and this was just the case. Every time they needed a copy of a plan, it was costing them £10 a copy, not to mention the time lost going back and forth to the printers. An architects time doesn’t come cheap.

Take our architect, they were spending up to £200 a month, just on printing plans, but didn’t have the cash flow to just go out and spend £2000+ on a new large format printing device, and didn’t want to commit to a 3 or 5 year financial commitment in the form of a lease.

Now add in the time, it was taking 30 minutes for every trip to the printers, and lets say (on average) they got 5 plans printed at the same time. And in real money terms, each trip was costing £20 (as they charged £40 an hour). This equates to 4 trips to the printers each month, which is an additional £80 in hidden monthly costs.

So, just to show you the scale of the issue here, lets do a simple calculation and work out the annual cost of printing large scale plans for this architect. £280 a month x 12 months = £3,360.00 each and every year. WOW!

The saving solution was actually quite simple, but sometimes it takes someone removed from the business to point this out…

Just buy a refurbished unit. You can pick decent quality HP ones up for around £600 and with a 3 months warranty. For this, you’ll also get the stand, collection bin, a set of part used cartridges and if your really lucky, they may even throw in a roll of paper.

So in our friends case, in real terms, they are saving 80% in year one, and saving close to 100% in years 2 & 3, as all they’ve got to pay for is the replacement cartridges and paper.

Yes, we know it’s not the latest all singing and dancing wireless model. But if you are a small business and cash flow is tight, this could be the saving solution for you.

At the end of the day, it’s just a business tool to print off large scale plans.