Paging System Cost: What a Fleet Costs Over Three Years

🧾 The four lines of a paging budget

Purchase, consumables, attrition, labour. Every paging fleet has all four, and quotations only ever mention the first.

Purchase is the easy one: around £150 to £400 for an entry kit of ten, and roughly £500 to £1,500 and up for professional ranges, depending on how much reach and how many units you need. Consumables are batteries. Attrition is the units that break or walk. Labour is the charging, the wiping and the counting.

Written out like that, the invoice is arguably the smallest of the four over three years.

• Purchase: the kit, once, plus the charging rack.
• Consumables: batteries, every season or two.
• Attrition: breakages and units that do not come back.
• Labour: minutes a day, every day you open.

📉 Attrition: the line everyone underestimates

Nobody loses ten coasters at once. You lose one in April, one in June, two over the summer, and by the autumn the basket is short and somebody orders more. It never feels like a budget line because it never arrives as one.

Takeaway counters lose more than table service, because the customer is already halfway out of the door when their order comes up. Seasonal sites lose more, because the team changes. And the replacement price of a single unit is rarely as good as the per-unit price in a kit.

⏳ Labour: the minutes nobody counts

A nightly batch wipe and dock of ten units takes roughly ten to fifteen minutes. Multiply that by the days you open and it becomes the largest line in the whole exercise, and it is paid in wages.

On top of that sit the ten-second wipes between customers, which are harder to total because they get skipped. That is not a saving, it is the routine failing, and the failure is invisible until an inspection asks about your cleaning schedule.

📊 Three years, side by side

Here is the comparison without the flattering assumptions. Hardware is priced with its purchase, a couple of battery rounds, a handful of replacements and the nightly upkeep. The virtual option is priced at nothing, because there is nothing to buy.

Treat every figure as an order of magnitude rather than a quote. Your own numbers will differ with your range, your volume and how many units walk out of your door.

🧭 When hardware is still worth the money

Sometimes it is, and pretending otherwise would be useless. If your dining room has genuinely poor mobile reception, hardware is not an indulgence, it is the only thing that works.

The same goes for a clientele who largely do not carry smartphones, and for sites that need a physical object for operational reasons. In those cases, buy the professional tier rather than the cheapest kit, because attrition and battery life are where an entry kit costs you back.

• Basements and thick-walled buildings with no signal.
• A clientele who do not carry phones.
• Any site where a physical object is required.
• In those cases: buy professional, not cheapest.

🧮 How to price this for yourself in ten minutes

You do not need a spreadsheet, just four numbers from your own site. Take the quoted kit price. Ask the supplier for the price of one replacement unit. Count how many units you lost last year. Time your own closing routine once, honestly.

Multiply the last two out over three years, add them to the purchase, and you have your real figure. Then put the free option beside it and make the decision with the whole number in view.

🖊️ Presenting the figure to whoever signs

If the decision is not yours alone, the way the number is presented decides the answer. A purchase price on its own always looks reasonable, which is precisely why quotations show nothing else.

So present all four lines together, over three years, and label them plainly: what we buy, what we keep buying, what we lose, what we pay somebody to do every night. Keep the figures as orders of magnitude and say so. A range you can defend is worth more in a meeting than a precise number you invented.

Then put the alternative beside it on the same sheet, with its own honest limits written in rather than hidden. Poor reception is a real risk, and customers without smartphones are a real constraint. A comparison that admits its weak points is the one that gets believed.

The last line is the one that usually settles it, and it is not money at all. It is the sixty-odd hours a year of closing routine, because that is time taken from people who are already at the end of a shift. Whoever signs the orders may not care about a coaster, but they will care about the rota.

• Show all four lines, over three years, on one sheet.
• Label them: buy, keep buying, lose, pay someone to do.
• Present ranges as ranges, and say where they came from.
• Write the limits of the alternative in, not out.
• Finish on the hours, not on the pounds.

Frequently asked questions