Printer contract renewal: what to do before yours rolls over

Start here: you probably have two contracts, not one

This trips up more businesses than anything else on this page. A copier arrangement is usually two separate agreements:

• A finance or lease agreement, with a leasing company, for the machine itself. This is the fixed monthly or quarterly payment.
• A service or maintenance agreement, usually with the dealer who supplied it, covering engineer visits, parts and toner. This is where your cost per copy lives.

They can have different end dates and different notice periods, and ending one does not end the other. Businesses regularly settle the finance agreement, congratulate themselves, and keep paying a service contract on a machine that has gone. Before anything else, find both pieces of paper.

Find your notice period before you do anything else

Somewhere in each agreement is a clause telling you how much notice you must give to stop it, and how that notice has to be given. It's usually measured in months rather than weeks, and it almost always has to be in writing.

Look for wording like “shall continue thereafter until terminated”, a heading about automatic renewal, or a minimum or primary period followed by a secondary one. Then do the arithmetic once, properly: take the start date, add the term, count the notice period back from that, and put the resulting deadline in a shared calendar with a reminder a few months earlier.

In a shared calendar, not in one person's head. The person who signed the original agreement is very often not the person who'll be there at renewal.

What happens if the notice window passes

The agreement renews itself. Depending on the wording that can mean rolling on month to month, or committing you to a further fixed period on the same rates — rates that were priced against a machine which was new when you signed and isn't now.

The tell-tale sign is that nothing happened. No renewal letter, no conversation, and the payments simply carried on. If you can't remember ever actively agreeing to your current terms, there's a reasonable chance you didn't.

The offer that tends to arrive before your term ends

Somewhere in the last year or two of a term, many businesses get approached with an upgrade: a newer machine, often described as costing the same or less, available now. What's frequently happening underneath is that a new full-length agreement is being started, with whatever is left on the old one settled and folded into it.

That is not automatically a bad deal. A newer device at a better click rate can genuinely work out cheaper even after absorbing the old balance. The point is that it's a decision about total cost over a whole new term, not the swap of like for like that the monthly figure can make it look like.

A timeline that works

Six months out

Find both agreements and confirm the two end dates and the two notice periods. Work out what you're actually paying now — lease payments plus click charges, annualised. Pull your last few service invoices and compare the meter readings against the minimum volume you committed to. If you're being billed the minimum rather than the meter, that's money going out for pages nobody printed.

Three months out

This is the point to find out what the same setup costs on a contract signed today, whether or not you intend to move. Without that number you're negotiating blind, and “we'll hold your current rate” sounds like a concession when it may not be one.

One month out

Serve notice if you're going to, in the manner the agreement requires, and keep proof you sent it. If you're staying, get the new terms in writing before the old ones lapse rather than after.

Your options at renewal

1. Renew as offered. Fine, if you've checked the total across the new term rather than the headline payment.
2. Renegotiate where you are. Take a current market comparison to your existing supplier and ask them to match it. Plenty of businesses do exactly this and stay put on better terms.
3. Retender. Put the same volume and service requirement to the market and compare properly.
4. End it. Return the equipment at the end of the term, following whatever the agreement says about condition, collection and final meter readings. Read that clause before you assume it's free.

What to have in front of you

• The finance agreement, with start date and term.
• The service agreement, with the click rates and any minimum volume.
• Your last two or three service invoices, for the meter readings.
• A rough current headcount, and how many days a week the office is full. Volume commitments signed before hybrid working often no longer match reality.

Where we come into it

You can do all of the above without speaking to anyone, and it's worth doing either way. If you'd like the market comparison rather than researching it yourself, that's what we do — the cost check on our homepage takes about a minute and runs entirely in your browser, and how the review works is set out step by step.

We also supply print ourselves — equipment, leasing and managed print — so if a review points to moving, we may quote for that work. Read what we tell you about your current contract with that in mind. Where we're not the right fit we'll say so, and if your existing deal is already fair, that's what you'll be told.

Related

• 5 signs you're overpaying on your printer contract — including the auto-rollover clause in detail.
• How photocopier leases actually work — why the cost arrives on two invoices.
• Buying vs leasing an office copier — worth reading if you're reconsidering the model, not just the supplier.
• Managed print and copier leasing in London and the South East — what we supply.
• Printers and copiers for hotels
• Photocopiers and printing for schools