How to set copier click charges that cover your costs

What a click charge has to cover

A click charge, also called cost per copy or CPC, is a price per page billed from the machine’s meter readings, usually quarterly in arrears. On an all-inclusive service agreement it normally pays for toner, replacement parts, the engineer’s labour and travel, and call-outs. Paper and staples are almost always excluded. Some dealers also exclude drums or other long-life units on particular models; whatever you include has to be inside the price.

That makes the click charge an insurance premium as much as a price. You are betting that the pages the customer prints will, on average, cost you less to support than you charge for them. The way to win that bet is to know what a page really costs you on each model, rather than reusing one rate for every machine in the fleet.

Toner: why the rated yield is only a starting point

Manufacturers declare toner yields using two international standards: ISO/IEC 19752 for monochrome toner cartridges and ISO/IEC 19798 for colour. Both define a standard set of test pages and a test method, so that yields from different makers can be compared. The test page is often described as roughly 5% coverage per colour, which is a fair shorthand.

Your customers do not print the test page. A solicitor’s letters may come in under it; an estate agent’s colour property details, a school’s worksheets with shaded boxes or an accounts team printing spreadsheets with grey banding will come in well above it. The rated yield is the right starting point for a quote, but you need a coverage allowance on top.

The best coverage factor is your own. If you know how many pages a machine printed between two cartridge shipments, you know the yield it actually achieved. A monitored fleet gives you this for every model, every quarter; without it, use 1.2 for general office mono and 1.5 or more for colour, and revise once you have data.

Parts and long-life units

The service manual gives a rated life in pages for each replaceable unit. Divide the price you pay by that life, then add an allowance for units that fail early, are damaged by the customer or are swapped during fault-finding. A 15–25% allowance is a reasonable starting assumption until your own parts history says otherwise.

Remember that mono pages on a colour machine still wear the transfer belt, the fuser and usually the black drum and developer. That is why a mono click on an A3 colour machine is normally priced higher than a mono click on a mono-only machine.

Labour, travel and call-outs

Start with a fully loaded engineer cost per hour: salary, employer’s National Insurance and pension, the van, fuel, insurance, phone, tools and training, divided by the hours an engineer is actually working on jobs or travelling to them. For many independent dealers this lands somewhere around £35 to £50 an hour. Use your own figure.

Then work out how often each model needs a visit. Your service history is the best source: total pages printed across all machines of a model in a year, divided by the number of visits to them. If an average visit takes 1.5 hours including travel and a model averages one visit every 50,000 pages, labour costs 1.5 × £40 ÷ 50,000 = 0.12p per page.

Low-volume machines are where labour hurts. A machine printing 1,500 pages a month that needs two visits a year costs the same £120 in labour as a busy one, but spread over 18,000 pages that is 0.67p per page before any toner or parts. This is what minimum charges are for, covered below.

Worked example: an A4 mono MFP

Putting the figures above together for a typical A4 mono multifunction printer in a busy office:

In practice you would quote 0.85p or 0.9p, depending on volume and how keen the deal is. Notice how much of the cost is not toner: on this example, toner is under half of the cost per page. A dealer who prices from toner alone will undercharge on every machine.

Worked example: an A3 colour MFP

A colour page uses all four toners, and colour coverage varies far more than mono. Take an A3 colour MFP with cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges at £95 each rated at 22,000 pages, and black at £55 rated at 28,000 pages under ISO/IEC 19798.

A quote of around 5p per colour page follows. If the customer prints a lot of full-page colour, such as flyers or photo-heavy reports, the coverage factor could be 2 or more and the cost per page above 3.5p, which leaves little margin at 5p. Ask what they print before you quote, and look at their current toner use if they are switching from another provider.

Margin, not markup

This is one of the most common pricing errors in dealer spreadsheets. If your cost is 0.52p and you want a 40% margin, the price is 0.52p ÷ (1 − 0.40) = 0.87p. Adding 40% to the cost gives 0.73p, and the margin on that is only (0.73 − 0.52) ÷ 0.73 = 29%.

Decide which overheads are in your cost per page and which the margin has to pay for. Office staff, software, stock holding, finance costs and the occasional customer who never pays are real costs. If they are not in the cost lines, the margin needs to be large enough to cover them and still leave a profit.

Protecting the price: minimums, A3 and reviews

Minimum charge or minimum volume

Set a minimum per billing period, either as a number of pages or a fixed amount, so a machine that prints far less than expected still covers its labour. For the low-volume example above, a minimum of 4,500 mono pages a quarter at 0.87p (about £39) would cover two visits a year at the earlier labour cost of £60 each, with something towards toner and parts.

A3 and other large sizes

Many contracts count an A3 page as two A4 clicks. If yours does, say so in the agreement and check which counter the machine uses for large pages, because models differ. If you do not, price the A3 work into the base rate.

Annual review

Toner and parts prices change, and so do your labour costs. A clause allowing an annual review, stated as a fixed percentage or linked to a published index, avoids having to renegotiate from scratch. Be clear about it at the start; customers object to increases they were not told about, not to increases as such.

VAT

Quote click charges excluding VAT and add it on the invoice at the standard rate, currently 20%. For example, a quarter of 12,400 mono pages at 0.85p (£105.40) and 2,150 colour pages at 5p (£107.50) comes to £212.90, plus £42.58 VAT, £255.48 in total.

Checking existing contracts against reality

A price that was right three years ago can be losing money today. Once a year, for every machine on contract, compare:

1. Click revenue for the year, from the billed meter readings.
2. Toner sent, at what it cost you.
3. Parts fitted, at cost.
4. Engineer visits and hours, at your loaded rate.

Sort by margin and look at the bottom ten. The usual culprits are low-volume machines with no minimum, colour machines printing far heavier pages than expected, toner being sent faster than the meters justify, and old machines that need more visits than they used to. Each has a different answer: a minimum, a revised colour rate, a conversation about toner, or a replacement machine.

This review is only as good as your records. When each machine’s readings, visits and parts are kept together, and meter readings and toner levels arrive every day, it becomes a report rather than a week of spreadsheet work. See how SubClik handles contracts and click billing, and our guide to meter billing mistakes for the errors that quietly erode margin.