What You Should Know To Purchase a Postage Meter

For many running a small business there is a line where it's time to purchase a postage meter.

In the beginning, you just purchase rolls of stamps from the post office and drop your letters off with the postal carrier once a day. Then one of two things will happen. You will either end up buying rolls of stamps more often than you want to or you will realize that not all of your packages can be shipped with a single first class stamp.

That means you have to carry all of them to the post office and wait in line for them to be weighed, then proper postage added.

Instead, think of the time you will save if you could have weighed those packages at the office, printed your own postage and then just waited for the mail carrier to pick them all up. If you send many packages that can mean 3-5 days a week when you can reclaim a lot of time that would have been wasted in the line at the post office.

Stamps.com lets you print postage 24 hours a day, 7 days a week..

Its time to purchase a postage meter system.

Before deciding on a postage meter, you need to learn something about the options that are available and compare them to the needs of your office.

First, make a list of what your office will need from a postage meter. Do you mainly ship letters or also packages? How large do your packages get? How many packages and letters do you send in an average month?

For most small businesses, you will only need a scale and a meter.

The scale will allow you to measure the weight of the items you are trying to ship. Packages are measured by weight for postage.

Stamps.com is the easiest, most convenient way to manage your mailing needs.. 

Postage meters vary. Some are very simple devices that ask you to input the postage price and then print. In the case of these meters, you will have to be able to do the math to decide the amount of postage that is needed for the package you are trying to send. Other meters are more technologically advanced and will allow you to input the shipping method you are using and weight, then will do the calculations for you. Still others will allow integration of the scale with the meter to do all of the work at once. It is important to remember that generally the more a meter can do, the more it will cost you to rent for use in your office. This also means that if you need other ad-ons like feeders, stackers, and sealers for your mailings, you will pay more for each of these features.

If you think you can walk out to the nearest office store and purchase a postage meter, you may be surprised to know you won't be allowed to own one, at least not the meter portion of the system. Postage meters cannot be purchased. They can only be leased.

If time is at a premium in your small business, making a decision to lease and purchase postage meter equipment is a wise move to relocate this process to your office and keep you, or other employees, from repeated runs to the post office.