Today almost every one of our clients uses thermal receipt printers although there is a going trend by retailers to use electronic receipts. It is cheaper, many customers prefer it as it does not fade and it is easy to store when they need it, and it gives the retailer client information for their loyalty program. So I expect that soon the paper receipt will go partly because of the trees and the lack of use. Soon in the US, I expect in many places it will be mandatory that a retailer must be able to do electronic receipts are compulsory on all retailers with Australia then following.
However, currently, we all use paper receipts so now sometimes I get asked for how much does the paper cost for a thermal receipt printer as let's face it the purchase price of the printer is only one cost.
This is a hard question to answer as it depends on many factors.
* How many receipts do you print? If you use electronic receipts, it will be very low.
* Do you print extras, eg do you print advertisements on the receipt, do you print discount vouchers, do you print heading with logos, etc. All this will add up. I would not write this part off immediately as if you notice the major retailers e.g. supermarkets who have done the maths like to print long receipts with advertisements so it must pay them to do it.
* What is your buy price on receipt paper?
* Wastage rate of receipt paper, I have seen people that buy a big lot of very cheap receipt printer, only to discover that when its time to use it, that many of rolls are useless as they are ruined.
* What sort of image are you prepared to give your shop, a low-quality receipt paper looks cheap. You may want something better.
* How many are you willing to buy, I have noticed that receipt rolls are much less expensive if you are prepared to buy in bulk plus the delivery costs are much cheaper per roll if you buy in bulk.
Firstly what you need is the number of receipts you print a day, if you do not know that you can use this calculation
How many transactions do you do in a period, your point of sale system should tell you this?
As a guess what percentage of your transactions, do you need to print a receipt?
Number of receipts a day = ( Transactions per period) x (Percentage of transactions where a receipt is printed) / (the number of days in a period)
The bigger the period you work with, the more accurate your figure will be.
Now you need an estimate of your receipt printer roll costs. I would expect that it would be somewhere between $2 to $10 a roll, so what are your rolls cost each?
How long are your rolls generally it is about 16 ft (for some reason it has not gone metric), but it works out to about 120 cm.
How big are your receipts? A typical figure is about 5 to 20 cm.
So your daily paper costs= (Number of receipts a day) x (Cost of your receipt roll) x (Length of your receipt) / (Length of receipt roll)
- It will add up say you do a hundred receipts a day
- Say you buy at $3.5 roll of 16 ft about 488 cm
- Say a receipt length is about 10 cm
It works out to about $7.17 a day.
Over a year it is about $2,582
