Most offices signed a photocopier agreement a few years ago, filed it, and haven't looked at it since. That's not carelessness — it's a confusing product, built to be read one invoice at a time. Plenty of businesses are overpaying and have no idea.
Who's actually in the room
People assume a copier deal is between two parties: them and "the printer company". In practice there are nearly always three.
- You. The business using the machine.
- The dealer. The people who specced the machine, installed it and send an engineer when it jams. They also send your service invoice.
- The finance house. A separate company you may never have spoken to, which bought the machine from the dealer and owns it. Your lease payments go to them.
That structure explains a lot of otherwise baffling behaviour. When you signed, the finance house typically paid the dealer the value of the agreement up front. From that moment the dealer has already been paid for the hardware, and their income comes from servicing you. The finance house has bought a stream of payments it expects in full — which is why the lease is a non-cancellable agreement. You can stop using the machine. You generally cannot stop paying for it.
None of this is a scandal. It's ordinary asset finance, and it's how most office equipment in the UK is placed. It just means the person you talk to and the person you owe money to aren't the same, and neither has an obvious reason to walk you through the whole picture.
Two agreements, not one
This is the single most useful thing to understand: you almost certainly signed two contracts, not one.
The finance agreement (the lease)
This covers the box: fixed payments for a fixed term, most often billed quarterly in advance. It sits with the finance house and usually contains a continuation clause — miss the written notice deadline and it rolls on.
The service agreement (the click contract)
Also called a maintenance, CPC (cost per copy) or managed print agreement. It sits with the dealer and covers toner, parts, engineer visits and often software. You pay a rate per page — one for mono, a higher one for colour — usually with a minimum volume you're billed for whether you print it or not.
Why the two end dates are the trap
Nothing forces those agreements to end on the same day, and often they don't — particularly if you've added a machine mid-term or upgraded early. You reach the end of one and find the other has years left, which quietly removes your ability to walk away. The reverse happens too: still paying service on a machine whose lease ended long ago.
The question worth asking today
"When exactly does each of my two agreements end, and what notice do I have to give?" Two dates and one deadline. If nobody can answer that in writing, that itself tells you something.
Where the money actually goes
Across a full term, the machine itself is usually the smallest slice of what you pay. The rest breaks down roughly like this:
- The hardware. A real cost, but a commoditised one. Ricoh, Canon, Konica Minolta, Sharp, Xerox — they all make perfectly good machines. The money is in the contract, not the box.
- Finance interest. A lease is borrowing. The rate is baked into the payment rather than shown as a percentage, so two identical machines can carry very different finance costs.
- Service and consumables. Toner, drum, fuser, waste unit and engineer time, recovered through the per-copy rate.
- Add-ons rolled in. Scanning software, document management, a few desktop printers, installation, training. Bundled into the payment, rarely itemised.
Because it arrives as one figure a quarter for finance and another for clicks, the total is hard to see. Add both invoices together and multiply by four. For most people that annual number is the moment the penny drops.
The clauses that move the number quietly
Annual uplifts
Many service agreements allow click rates to rise once a year, linked to RPI or set as a fixed percentage in the small print. Whichever it is, the clause will say so explicitly — it is worth finding and reading. It compounds, and it usually arrives without a conversation.
Minimum volumes
You commit to a number of pages per period. Print fewer — and hybrid working cut volumes in a lot of offices — and you pay for them anyway. It's a common reason a contract that was fair at signing isn't fair now.
Automatic rollover
Miss the notice window and the agreement renews itself, often for a further fixed period. The window is stated in your terms — usually measured in months rather than weeks — and notice normally has to be in writing.
Settlement figures
Leaving early means paying a settlement — broadly the rentals left to run, sometimes discounted for early receipt. If a new supplier offers to "clear" your existing agreement, that money hasn't vanished; it has been rolled into your new payments. Ask to see it written down separately.
What to check on your own paperwork
Fifteen minutes with the file will tell you most of it:
- The end date of the finance agreement, and whether payments are quarterly or monthly.
- The end date of the service agreement, and whether it matches.
- The notice period to prevent automatic renewal, and the address or method notice must be sent to.
- Your mono and colour click rates, and any clause allowing them to increase.
- Your minimum volume, next to what you actually print now.
- Anything bundled in you no longer use.
Knowing those six things puts you ahead of most businesses, and costs nothing. The best time to look is a few months before your term ends, while you still have leverage and no settlement to worry about. For a quick sense of the annual total, the calculator on our homepage does the arithmetic in about a minute — no login, and nothing leaves your browser until you decide you want a comparison.