How do I make sure I get fair pricing from my vendor?

In general, the cost to use an offsite document storage company will depend on the quantity and sizes of the items you have in storage, as well as the amount of service activity you have relating to your stored items.

However, pricing among vendors varies considerably. When comparing vendors, it is important to consider several factors that can impact your overall cost.

National company versus local company

Logic might suggest that you would enjoy better pricing with a national company that enjoys larger operations and efficiencies of scale. However, in the document storage industry this is often not the case.

Competition is not very fierce for national accounts since there are only two national vendors. The efficiencies of dealing with only one vendor throughout the country can be outweighed by the lack of competitive pricing pressure.

On smaller accounts, national vendors aim to make the same high profit margins that they do on their larger accounts. In order to achieve those margins, they charge high monthly minimum "administration" charges - including both monthly minimum storage charges and monthly account maintenance fees. These two fees taken together can make a national vendor more than twice as expensive as a non-national vendor.

Pricing tactics to look out for

While most document storage companies appear to use very similar pricing structures, minor differences in the way charges are applied can have a big impact on what your total costs will be.

Lookout for pricing based on "cubic feet". If you pay based on the cubic foot volume of your boxes, then you will need to multiply every amount on the rate sheet by the cubic volume of your boxes (note that all standard document storage boxes are larger than 1.0 cubic foot).

Further, it is not enough to simply measure the cubic volume of your boxes, since some vendors "mark up" the cubic footage of boxes - disclosing this only in the fine print on their websites.  If your vendor charges by the cubic foot, find out exactly how many cubic feet they will charge for your particular boxes and then compare with other vendors.

Also look out for hidden charges such as fuel surcharges, which can add as much as 10% to your monthly invoice.

Minimum service charges per order are another new tactic being used to increase the amount you pay each time you request service. These minimum per order charges can be craftily designed to ensure they apply to almost all orders.