Managed print services vs print management
- 5.0 on Google from 150+ reviews
- Trading since 2010
Print management is software you licence, and it covers 1 layer of the problem.
- Includes the answer where you buy neither
- Written by an operator who sells one of the three
- No saving percentage anywhere on this page
Managed print is an agreement covering the hardware and the labour as well.
There are 3 purchases here rather than 2, and the middle one is almost never offered to you.
For a fair number of organisations it is the right one.
Written for whoever has to justify the choice.
An organisation with several offices, and a print bill nobody can explain.
Where managed print puts the hardware and the labour
Check which of the three you need
- 5.0 Google rating, from 150+ five star reviews
- Since 2010 Australian owned and Queensland based
- 500+ Australian businesses on an agreement with us
- Next day A technician on site the next business day
Trading year and client count: published by Global Document Solutions, who operate this service, and read from their site on 5 September 2026.
Rating and review count: from the Google Business Profile for Global Document Solutions, read the same day.
Next business day attendance: a commitment we make, not a measured result.
Print and output management, or output management.
Print management services, or managed printing.
All four get used for both purchases, by different vendors, in the same week.
The words will not tell you what is being sold.
The invoice will.
Ask this: “Does the price you have quoted include the machine, or is the machine billed on top?”
Last updated 5 September 2026.
Why is this presented as a choice between two things
Because the 2 people presenting it each sell 1 of them.
Per the published Australian benchmark there are 3 distinct commercial models in this market.
The middle one is invisible for a commercial reason rather than a technical one.
Licence the software
You keep your machines and buy rules, quotas, secure release and tracking.
Document workflows and print usage reporting come with it.
Billed per user or per device, per year.
You still fix the jams and you still buy the toner.
You still own the problem when a device dies in a branch office.
Downtime and supply replenishment both stay with you.
Service contract on machines you own
You keep the hardware and buy the labour and the toner against it.
Per the published Australian benchmark, that service rate alone runs 0.5 to 1.2 cents a mono page.
Nobody leads with this, because there is no hardware sale attached to it.
Ask for the service level agreement that sits behind it as well.
Ask for it by name.
The full managed agreement
Devices, servicing, toner and software in one per page rate.
That is the full MPS purchase, with no upfront cost for the hardware.
Bundled Australian rates run 1.2 to 3.5 cents a mono page.
The largest purchase of the three.
The only one that removes the hardware refresh from your capital planning.
Both rate ranges come from the CopierChoice Australia Printer and Copier Cost Benchmark Report 2025.
The gap between them is the device, not a margin, which is the single most useful thing to understand before comparing any two quotes.
Not sure which of the three you actually need
Say which one you think you need and we will tell you if you are wrong.
Which of the three should your organisation buy
Four questions, answered in order.
The first of the 4 that gives you a clear no decides it, and you can stop there.
- Question 1
-
Is your hardware recent, networked and still supported
If yes, you do not need option three yet.
A fleet bought in the last two or three years has most of its useful life ahead of it.
Replacing it to get a better per page rate is paying for a refresh you did not need.
Take the service contract, or the licence, and revisit at the end of the hardware life.
Data from the CopierChoice benchmark puts most Australian equipment agreements at 3 to 5 years.
Hardware bought 18 months ago has most of its funded life still ahead of it.
Networked matters as much as recent, because a device that cannot report a meter cannot be managed at all.
Still supported matters most of the 3, since parts availability decides whether a repair is possible.
A device out of parts support is a device waiting to become an emergency purchase at a bad moment.
- Question 2
-
Does someone in your organisation own print today
Not somebody who could.
Somebody whose actual job includes knowing what every site prints and who to ring when a device stops.
If that person exists and has capacity, software plus a service contract works well and costs less.
If nobody can name that person, you are buying the labour whether you mean to or not.
Option three is the honest version of that.
In most organisations of 5 or more offices that person turns out to be an office manager doing it unofficially.
They order the toner, they ring the repairer and they carry the whole arrangement in their head.
That is the print infrastructure running on one person’s memory.
The cost of that is real and it never appears on a print invoice.
It appears when they leave, and nobody can say what any site prints for about 6 months.
- Question 3
-
Is the problem control, or is it cost
Control problems are software problems.
A licence fixes them, and fixes them cheaply.
There are 4 of them:
- Colour printed where mono would do
- No quotas and no limits by person or team
- Documents sitting in trays
- No record of who printed what, or where
Cost problems are device and contract problems.
Wrong machines at the wrong sites, 8 separate arrangements, retail toner in the branches.
Software will report on all of that.
It will change none of it.
Documents sitting in trays is the one item on that list a licence genuinely fixes.
So what a managed release queue does that a device PIN cannot is the detail worth reading first.
The test is whether the fix you need is a rule or a purchase.
A rule is enforced by software the week after it is licensed.
A purchase needs somebody to specify the device, buy it, install it and service it.
Buying software for a purchase problem is the most common wasted spend in this category.
- Question 4
-
How many separate arrangements are you carrying
One or two is a purchasing question.
Six or eight, each signed by a different person on a different date, is a structural one.
The saving in that case comes from pooling the volume onto one commitment.
The cost savings are a fleet management result rather than a software one.
No licence can do that, and no service contract on your existing machines can do it either.
That is the case option three exists for.
Six arrangements also means 6 renewal dates, and a renewal date you have missed is a rollover you did not choose.
Consolidating them takes one term to complete, because each site joins the agreement as its own contract ends.
The volume pools from the first day, whichever sites have joined so far.
From $160 + GST a month per device.
Volume is pooled across every site, so a larger fleet prices into a lower band.
Paper, staples and pages above your agreed volume sit outside that figure.
When is managed print the wrong purchase
The pillar page lists the organisations it does not suit.
This is the narrower question of when the service is wrong even though the organisation looks right for it.
When the fleet was just replaced
A capital purchase made eighteen months ago has three or four years of life left in it.
Folding it into a managed agreement means paying again for machines you already own.
A service contract against that hardware gets you the toner, the labour and the monitoring.
Without the second purchase.
Ask for that instead and be suspicious of anyone who will not price it.
The exception is a fleet that was replaced badly, meaning the wrong device class at several sites.
On the published lease bands a mismatched site costs 65 to 95 dollars a month for the whole term.
Across 8 sites that is worth reopening even on hardware bought last year.
A meter read tells you which of the two situations you are in, and it takes a day.
When the real problem is one department
If the entire issue is that marketing prints too much colour, a licence with quotas solves it.
For a fraction of the money, and next month.
Restructuring a whole fleet to fix the behaviour of 12 people is expensive.
It is a conversation you could have had directly.
A quota is a rule, and a rule costs a licence fee rather than a 5 year term.
Set colour to require a reason code and the behaviour usually changes inside a month.
If it does not change, you now have a report naming who is doing it and how often.
That report is a better basis for the conversation than a restructured fleet would have been.
When nobody will attend the review
The value of a managed agreement past year one sits in the quarterly review.
That is the review that moves devices between sites.
An organisation that will not put four meetings a year in a calendar will drift.
It gets the first year benefit and then loses it.
It would be better served by a simpler contract it does not have to manage.
The review is where a device is moved off a site that no longer needs it.
It is also where print volumes are checked against the band you committed to.
Skip four of those in a row and the printer fleet is wrong for the rest of the term.
When volume is genuinely collapsing
Your organisation is actively removing paper.
Committing to a monthly page band for three to five years bets against your own plan.
Software and a short service contract keep the option open.
Distance is the other thing people expect to rule it out, and the Tasmanian page works through why it does not.
The four organisation level cases where we would tell you not to buy are on the cost page.
Where we sit in that decision
We sell the third of the three, and there are organisations we would send elsewhere.
We sell option three.
We will price option two against your existing machines if that is the better answer.
We do not sell software on its own.
If question three above came back as a pure control problem, we are not the supplier you need.
We would rather say so now.
What each of the three takes off your desk
| Licence only | Service on your hardware | Full managed print | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who buys the devices | You, already did | You, already did | The supplier |
| Who fixes them | You | The supplier | The supplier |
| Who buys toner | You | The supplier | The supplier |
| Rules and secure release | Yes | Only if licensed too | Yes, normally included |
| Hardware refresh | Your capital problem | Your capital problem | Inside the agreement |
| Billed as | Per user or device, yearly | Per page, device excluded | Per page, device included |
The comparison table setting the two purchases side by side, row by row, sits on the pillar page rather than being repeated here.
Read the six point comparison alongside what managed print includes.
The two questions this comparison keeps raising
What is the difference between print management and managed print services?
Print management usually means software you licence.
Rules, quotas, secure release and tracking, billed per user or device.
Managed print services is an agreement that covers the devices and the labour as well, billed per page printed.
A third option sits between them.
A service contract covering toner and maintenance on hardware you already own.
Few suppliers lead with it, because no hardware sale is attached.
Print management is software you licence, so it reports, enforces rules and holds jobs, and it leaves every machine on your balance sheet.
That print management software sees the print environment without changing the printer fleet in it.
Managed print is an agreement, so it supplies the device, the servicing, the parts and the toner at one rate per page.
The third option, which is rarely offered by name, is a service contract on machines you already own.
That buys the labour and the toner without buying the hardware again.
A bundled managed rate sits at 1.2 to 3.5 cents a mono page in the 2025 CopierChoice benchmark, because the device is inside it.
When is managed print the wrong purchase?
When the fleet was bought inside eighteen months and has years left, because folding it in means paying twice.
When the real problem is one department printing too much colour, which a licence with quotas fixes far more cheaply.
When nobody in the organisation will attend a quarterly review, since that is where the value sits after year one.
And when print volume is genuinely collapsing, because a three to five year page commitment then bets against your own plan.
It is wrong when the fleet was replaced outright in the last 12 to 18 months, because the hardware is already funded.
It is wrong when the whole problem is one department printing too much colour, which a licence with quotas fixes for far less.
It is wrong when nobody in the organisation will attend the quarterly review, since that review is where the value past year 1 sits.
It is wrong when volume is genuinely collapsing, because a committed volume you cannot reach is a bill for pages you never print.
In each of those 4 cases a service contract or a software licence is the honest purchase.
Tell us which of the three you think you need
If you are not sure, say so and say why.
Getting that wrong costs more than getting the rate wrong.
It is the part we would rather argue about before a quote exists.
What their customers write on Google
Managed Printer Services is new. Global Document Solutions, who run it, is not.
When something breaks
We have had a great experience with this team.
They are always prompt, helpful and really easy to deal with.
Any issues are sorted quickly and the whole printer leasing process has been seamless.
On price, and on being told things
I highly recommend Cyrus at Global Document Solutions.
The service was brilliant from start to finish, with clear communication and attention to detail.
Pricing was extremely competitive and offered value for money.
Replacing a machine already on contract
We replaced our existing machine (also through GDS) and, as always, the process was seamless.
We had our machine up and running with minimal downtime.
These are reviews of Global Document Solutions, who operate this service, and not of this site.
Each one is copied word for word from their Google Business Profile, under the name Google shows, read on 7 September 2026.