Often times when addressing office printing, businesses will try to limit or eliminate color printing because of budget concerns. In other cases, organizations may not even be aware of the cost of their color printing which causes them to inefficiently proceed with costly behaviors without a plan. Luckily there is a way to manage your color volume without taking drastic measures through a tiered color feature. 

Tiered Color

With an agreement in place utilizing tiered color, your prints are tracked by the device by the amount of color toner used on the page (print coverage) and classified into one of three pricing groups. While the pricing groups are subject to change based on a variety of factors, including the model of copier you are using, you can usually expect around .035 for low tier, .055 for medium tier, and .08 for high tier. These prices are per copy and not dependent upon allowances. This means that you are truly paying for what you use. Not all devices are capable of performing tiered color, so it is best to talk with your sales representative (or one of ours) regarding how to get this function in place for your workplace. 

Traditional Approach

In order to see if tiered color is right for your office, you need to have an understanding of how the classic approach to color volume is handled. Usually, you will be contracted for a specified number of prints per month and then there would be an overage rate and cycle to abide by. Overages are the amount you print over your allotment and the cycle is how often they are calculated per year. If you were to go under your allotment the prints would not rollover to the next cycle. 

Tiered Color Benefits

One of the major benefits tiered color gives you is the affordability it brings to color prints that don’t use color images but instead use maybe a logo or a chart. Even the printing of a hyperlink without tiered color would cost you a full color print charge ranging sometimes beyond 10 cents! Having the ability to offset minor and major color is one of, if not the best way to make color more affordable. Though, it is also nice to not have an allowance in the sense that you can monitor over time your usage and then develop a policy for restricting color usage for employees or departments, rather than cutting it off from the start by slashing your allotted number of copies. There are benefits to using color in your output and if that is a feature that makes your employees feel better about their work, it is most likely a worthy incentive to offer compared to the costs of other perks they may desire.  

As you can see by the breakdown above, there would be a significant savings for the ABC company if their volume stayed fairly consistent. Another factor to consider is the flexibility not having an allowance can afford you. If your employees are out of the office for an extended amount of time for say a pandemic, you wouldn’t have to pay for prints they didn’t use.

Want to investigate whether your organization could benefit from a tiered color program? We can help you decipher which tier your current documents would fall under and how much you could save by switching. Give us a call at 800-648-7081 or visit us on the web to schedule an appointment today with one of our sales representatives.