The real cost of franking
01/05/2008Franking machines can be a great way to pay for your postage. They are convenient, postage is charged at a discount to the price of stamps, and they often come with clever add-ons such as postal scales or logo printing. But how much do franking machines really cost?It is easy to compare the cost of a stamp and the price of postage when franking to see that franking is at least 2p cheaper that using a stamp. If everything else was equal, this would result in a simple saving, and it would seem idiotic to not frank your mail. However there are a lot more costs to consider when using a franking machine. For a start, franking machines have to be bought, or more usually leased. Franking machines also use consumable items such as ink to provide the frank mark and labels to allow postage to be added to parcels and oversized letters. On top of this many franking machines contain small computer chips that contain the current year’s postage rates. Once the postage rates change, the computer chip has to be replaced, often at the cost of the customer.
Of course the use of stamps also has hidden costs such as queuing at the Post Office and the disadvantage of sometimes have to add extra postage due to the lack of the correct denomination stamps.
So who sells the cheapest franking machine when looking at the cost to purchase and then run, including all the direct consumables? As you can imagine the costs vary with each supplier, but thanks to an Office of Fair Trading ruling just over three years ago, the suppliers now have to make their prices available and transparent to their customers. Using these published prices it is hard to choose an outright winner in the price wars as some charge more for consumables, and less for rental, whilst other suppliers may charge to re-credit the customers franking machine with postage.
In researching for this article Mailroom News looked into the various different ways for paying for postage. In its opinion franking machines are still the most convenient way for a small business to pay for its postage. It’s just worth knowing that you can shop around between the authorised suppliers to get the best deal for you.