Hey P4P'ers. Jesse emailed this to me the other day. If you have time you can "follow" Jesse on this site by clicking his name and then click "follow"
Art
If you are in the market for a copier and have been trying to understand what would make a copier lease "good" vs "bad," we are here to help!
There are several facets that make a lease good vs bad:
- Does the lease contain provisions that are designed to benefit the supplier or the buyer?
- Is the lease using "fair" lease factors?
- Customer service of the leasing company
- Customer service of the copier service company
Let's take these quickly one at a time:
Does the lease contain provisions that are designed to benefit the supplier or the buyer?
If you read your lease, and you really sure, there are always provisions you need to be careful of. We look for certain common items which make leases more expensive by nature when evaluating a copier lease for our clients
- Rates can increase (will increase) a certain percentage due to factors we have no control of (nor a desire to control) - Typical is 5% to 10% per year. If you start at 200 a month, by year 5 you could be at $300 a month. Lease creep gets expensive.
- "You have to notify us in writing no more than 90 Days from Lease term and no Less than 60 Days" or the lease automatically renews a year. You should always try and get this out of your contract if possible and put a reminder in your calendar if you can't.
This can get tough to define, but while you are getting quotes, you can always ask what the lease rate factors being used are. We saw a site with current lease rates that you might be interested to see. There are other factors involved, like is it new or used - what your credit rating is - is it a company lease or personal guarantee, etc. If it is way out of line, keep looking.
Customer service of the leasing company?
Everyone says their customer service is great. A good check is to find out what leasing company the copier uses and then call that company as if you had a problem and see how long it takes to talk to an actual person, do they speak English, do they seem like they want to help. You are going to be dealing with them in one form or another for the next 5 years, so it does matter.
Customer service of the copier service company?
Many people think the beauty of leasing is that when you lease if there are major problems, you can stop paying. That is not how a lease works. A lease is a financial agreement between you and a bank and doesn't assume the quality of the equipment being financed. Some performance metrics can be inserted into a lease to reduce your costs for extremely poor performance, but the bank will not forgive your lease if the copier isn't working. This is why it is critical to have a solid maintenance agreement on your copier lease.
If you are not getting great service on the copier it will FEEL like a bad lease, no matter how good the leasing company is. The bank expects you to check the quality of both the equipment and supplier. They are merely financing the obtaining of the copier.
When looking to lease a copier, a good lease will not be filled with disadvantageous terms for you, will not use excessive lease rate factors, will have great customer service and great service from the company providing the copier to you. If you are not comfortable with all 4 of the above factors, get another quote since you will be working with that copier company for the next 5 years.
Jesse Harwell is a copier sales professional and owner of the blog Copier Lease Center which gives advice on how to get a great copier lease for your company.
-=Good Selling=-
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