Printer Leasing Edinburgh

Edinburgh has 18,635 businesses. What sets it apart is the kind: professional, scientific and technical firms make up 19.2% of them, finance and insurance 3.7%, and information and communication 8.8%, all well above the Scottish and UK shares. ONS counts 430 legal practices in the city, more than Glasgow’s 350 even though Glasgow has more businesses overall, and 260 banks and other financial firms.

Those are the offices that print client files, contracts, statements and board papers. For them, the cheapest monthly price is only half the question. The other half is what happens to sensitive documents on and around the machine.

In a lot of professional offices the copier earns its keep as a scanner. Signed engagement letters, ID documents, title deeds and incoming post all need to end up in the right digital file, quickly and without being emailed around.

When you compare quotes, ask what each machine can scan straight into: email, a network folder, or the document or practice management system you already use. Ask how fast it scans double-sided documents, whether it can make searchable PDFs, and whether scanned files are kept on the device or sent and cleared.

Print management software sits between your computers and your machines. It is what makes print release work, but it can do a lot more. It can send large jobs to the fastest machine, default everyone to double-sided mono, ask before printing a long colour document, and stop jobs being sent to a machine that is out of paper.

For firms that bill time and costs to clients, the most useful feature is often recharging. Staff choose a client or matter number when they print or copy, and the software records the pages against it. At month end you have a report of print costs per client, which can be added to a bill or simply used to see where the money goes.

Quotas are the other common use. A department can be given a monthly page allowance, with a warning as it gets close. Used sensibly, that keeps colour printing for the documents that need it without anyone feeling policed.

Take an office printing about 5,000 pages a month, half of them in colour. Our lease calculator puts two compact A4 colour machines, each printing 2,500 pages, at about £96 a month together on 60-month terms. One A3 colour machine printing all 5,000 pages comes to about £93 a month.

So the single machine is cheaper on paper, but it puts all your printing in one place and can print A3. Two machines cost a little more, keep a floor working if the other is out of action, and save a walk up or down the stairs dozens of times a day. Which is better value depends on your building and how you work, which is why it is worth asking suppliers to price both. These are our own planning figures, not quotes.

Professional firms rarely print evenly through the year. The city’s 240 accounting and bookkeeping firms, for example, have their busiest stretch before the 31 January Self Assessment deadline. Law firms see peaks around completions, hearings and the bundles that go with them. Financial firms have quarter-ends and year-ends.

A machine sized for an average month can struggle in those weeks, and a queue at the copier on a deadline day is expensive. When you ask for quotes, give suppliers your busiest month as well as your average, so they can recommend a machine with enough speed and paper capacity. If the peak is short and sharp, a short-term rental alongside your normal machine can be cheaper than leasing a bigger one all year.