Copier Leases

When you decide to sign an office copier lease, you are entering into a relationship with a lease company that will typically last five years or more. Prior to entering into this lengthy business relationship, do something that most others do not — read the contract before signing it! Then, be sure to ask about any terms that are not easily understood.

Lease contracts are written by attorneys to protect their clients, such documents are not written with your interests in mind. They are essentially adversarial documents. Therefore, if you are not in agreement with any contract terms, have them changed or walk away. If anything about the lease agreement is confusing, and the sales rep cannot explain it to your satisfaction, get full clarification before moving forward.

The fine print in lease agreements is regularly used to essentially “cover” copier companies. A company sends a rep to your office with a super-low copier lease rate. It is counting on a number of fees and charges built into the “fine print” of the lease to make the real profits. Doc fees, late charges, and insurance premiums are just a few of the tools that lease companies use to increase their “take” at your expense.  Some of these will be standard fee and unavoidable, others are simply add-ons.  If you have several copier quotes, it should be relatively easy to compare these.

Again, simply read and understand the document that is being signed before locking your business into a long-term relationship with a copier lease company.

Anytime you hear a copier rep include the word “fee” in a sentence, it’s important to pay attention. Doc fees and return fees are two types of charges that together can cost your enterprise hundreds of dollars. As you are winding your way through all of those cool features available on today’s copiers, it’s way too easy to let avoidable “fees” sneak right past you.

The Documentation Fee

If the lease company wants to charge you a “doc fee” for preparing the documents, keep in mind that there is really no need for you to pay for them to simply print off multiple copies of your lease agreement. This fee is often a quick $150 or $200, and the cost can often be reduced to $75 or less by merely asking the rep to “make it go down.”

The Return Fee

A “return fee” is often charged at the end of the Seattle copier lease if the lessee chooses not to purchase it or to extend the lease. Such fees are a common source of revenue for lease companies because most customers pay virtually no attention to what going to happen three or five years later. The potential lessee’s attention is focused on the “here and now.”

One may reasonably ask whether it is appropriate to charge a fee for a driver to wheel the copier to the elevator, out the door, and up a ramp into the back of his truck. It is possible to reduce, or to eliminate any return fee by merely asking the rep to do so.  It gets more complicated if you have to ship the copier back somewhere.  The easiest way to avoid fees like this is to get a $1 Buyout lease rather than a FMV lease.  The $1 Buyout simply means that you pay a dollar at the end of the lease and then the copier is yours to do whatever you want with it.