What is managed print services?

Managed print services means taking responsibility for managing the ongoing operation and cost of a customer's print fleet, not just selling them toner.

That is the definition. The more useful question, and the one this article spends most of its time on, is where that responsibility stops. I have been selling and servicing office equipment for 30 years, 15 of them owning this dealership, and most of the trouble I see on these agreements sits at the boundaries.

Which devices can go on an agreement?

Both multifunction copiers and desktop laser printers. They do not all have to be the same brand as the equipment I sell.

The test is whether it is a business-class machine I can reasonably support, get parts and supplies for, and monitor. Putting a machine on the agreement when it fails that test just produces a promise I cannot keep.

I am not going to put a 10-year-old $179 consumer inkjet on a managed print agreement just so I can say I manage every printer in the building.

Managed print can start from equipment you already own, or I can place equipment as part of it. The same test applies to every device that goes on the agreement either way.

What is covered, and what is not

On a device I accept, the agreement covers toner, service labor, normal-wear replacement parts, drums and maintenance kits where applicable, fuser assemblies where they are a normal maintenance item, transfer components, waste toner containers, preventive maintenance, meter collection, supply replenishment, service history and device-level usage tracking, and remote monitoring where the device and the network allow it.

The exclusions matter more, because that is where a customer gets surprised.

That is how my agreements are written. Terms vary between providers and between documents, so read the one in front of you.

Our standard equipment agreement follows the same philosophy. Service calls, labor, parts, toner and consumables are included. Paper and staples are excluded, along with non-mechanical or network work and damage from misuse, unauthorized relocation, outside supplies, or external conditions. What a per-page rate covers on the equipment side is a longer subject, and I have written it out in what a click charge covers and what it does not.

Three things people assume are covered

These come up often enough that they are worth naming before you sign anything.

Paper. This is number one, every time. Managed print covers what goes through the machine and keeps it running. The paper itself is yours.

IT support. A customer tells me the printer will not scan to email, so that should be covered. Sometimes the machine is fine. Microsoft changed authentication, somebody changed a password, the firewall changed, or the scan folder moved. That is a network problem and it needs someone who works on networks.

Anything that happens to the machine. Managed print covers normal operation and normal wear. Somebody can break a tray, run adhesive labels through the fuser, move the machine themselves and damage it, and those repairs do not fall automatically under the agreement.

What the monitoring is actually for

Monitoring is part of the value, and it is worth being precise about what it looks at.

It looks at the machine. Meter counts, toner levels, supply status, alerts, device status, usage patterns. It does not read the contents of your documents. User-level print tracking is a separate capability that would only apply if you separately approved and deployed print-management software designed to collect it.

That data is what makes the rest of it work. It lets me see toner getting low before you run out, collect meters without walking the building, see which printers are doing all the work, see which ones are sitting almost unused, identify unusually high color usage, and find devices that should be consolidated or replaced.

Who should not buy this

Plenty of offices do not need managed print, and I would rather say so here than have the conversation after you have signed something.

You probably do not need it if you have one inexpensive desktop printer and maybe a second as a backup, very low monthly volume, no recurring service problems, no difficulty keeping a toner cartridge on the shelf, nobody spending meaningful time managing printers, and no real business consequence when a printer is down.

Take an eight-person office printing 600 or 800 pages a month on one reliable laser printer. I would rather tell them to buy toner when they need it and call me if the machine becomes a problem. Putting that office on an agreement would add paperwork to a situation that is already working.

Where it starts making sense

The picture changes with some combination of these: multiple printers scattered around, several manufacturers or toner types, employees buying toner from different vendors, nobody knowing the real monthly print cost, recurring service calls, untracked color printing, expensive desktop cartridges, spare printers kept just in case, IT staff time going to printer problems, multiple locations, frequent supply emergencies, and enough volume that one badly placed device costs real money.

Employee count is a poor test for this. A 20-person law office can print more than a 100-person software company.

Here is the rule I actually use. One or two devices, very little printing, and almost no staff time spent managing them means managed print is probably unnecessary. Five, 10 or 20 devices with nobody able to say what the fleet costs is where I want to look.

The goal is not to put every printer in Arizona under contract. The goal is to solve a problem expensive enough to justify managing.

How long is the commitment?

My standard managed-print agreement for service and supplies is month to month and can be canceled with 30 days' written notice.

Equipment can create a separate obligation. When I place new equipment under a conventional lease, that lease has its own term, most commonly 60 months, although shorter terms are available, and is generally noncancelable during that term. Canceling the service and supplies agreement does not cancel the equipment lease.

If I am managing equipment you already own, there is no new equipment lease, so the 30-day notice normally governs the entire managed-print arrangement.

In some situations I use an FTS month-to-month equipment rental instead of a bank lease. That rental has its own written cancellation terms. The point is to identify every agreement involved rather than assume that one cancellation provision controls all of them.

The point worth carrying into any agreement of this kind is that one monthly figure can sit on top of more than one obligation, and the cancellation language on one document does not govern the second one. That is the same problem I describe in what is a cost per copy agreement. Ask what the term is, ask what happens if you want out during it, and get both answers in writing. If a notice deadline is involved, what happens if you miss the cancellation window on your copier lease covers how those dates work.

What we do about it

We price our standard managed-print agreements against what you actually print. We do not require a monthly, quarterly, or annual volume commitment unless a customized proposal expressly says otherwise.

If a minimum ever applies, it should be stated plainly, not buried inside a monthly figure. That argument is made in full in what a committed volume costs you.

I provide local service during normal business hours and prioritize down equipment based on the operational impact to the customer.

The honest counterpoint, and it applies to everything above. An agreement is overhead. For a small, stable, one-printer office it is overhead with nothing on the other side of it, and the disqualification section above is there because I would rather lose that agreement than write it. If you are holding proposals from more than one provider and cannot tell which is cheaper, the method for working that out is in comparing two managed print quotes, and it applies whether or not you end up here.

What this looks like in practice

The following is a representative composite, built from fleet patterns and contract structures I see regularly. It is not a verified customer case and no single customer is described here.

A roughly 50-employee wholesale distributor runs two floor-standing color multifunction copiers and nine desktop laser printers, 11 devices in total, printing roughly 19,000 black and white and 2,400 color pages a month.

In a fleet like this, nobody owns the print environment. Accounting pays the copier service invoices, office managers order desktop toner online, IT buys drums and maintenance kits when printers throw errors, and somebody occasionally runs to an office supply store because a cartridge ran out.

Reconstructing a year of that spending, service and supplies only with no equipment lease payments included, gives roughly $1,470 a month.

Under a managed service-and-supplies arrangement, excluding any separate equipment lease payments, the supported fleet in this example comes to approximately $1,135 per month. That is about $335 a month lower on the same basis, roughly $4,000 across a year.

The saving is only half of it. Device-level volume in a fleet like this typically surfaces three things: one desktop printer producing almost no volume that does not need to be there, two employees using expensive desktop color printers for work that could go to the shared multifunction device at a substantially lower page cost, and far more toner sitting on the shelf than the fleet needs, because everybody orders independently.

The reasonable steps from there are to remove the unnecessary printer, redirect the high-volume color work to the multifunction devices, standardize the remaining desktop fleet, and put supply replenishment under one process.

Before, that office had 11 machines but no managed fleet. After removing the unnecessary printer, it had 10 supported devices managed as one system.

What managed print services actually is

Managed print services means one provider managing the ongoing operation and cost of your print fleet. The value of it depends entirely on whether you have a fleet worth managing, and a good part of this article exists to help you work out whether you do.

If you want the real number, send me 12 months of toner and printer-supply purchases, any copier service invoices, and a list of your current printers and copiers. I will organize the spending, calculate the fleet's annual and monthly cost, and show you which devices are consuming it where the records allow. I normally return the first-pass analysis within three business days after receiving complete records. Larger or multi-location fleets may take up to five. Use the form on this page, call or text (480) 787-0694, or email team@ftcgsolutions.com.

Nothing here is legal or financial advice. Agreement terms vary considerably between providers, and you should read your own.