How our launch dealer replaced a $560/month FMAudit bill and cut $3,000 of overstock toner

MeterBeam · Case study · October 2026

Our launch dealer is a family-owned Chicago-area copier dealer, in business since 1983. MeterBeam was built inside this dealership, and it was our first customer.

By the numbers

• $560 a month: the FMAudit subscription, now cancelled
• At least $3,000 of surplus toner off customer shelves since July
• 59 printers and copiers monitored automatically across 14 locations
• About 107,700 device readings collected since July 7, 2026, with nobody asking for them
• 129 offline, 49 printer-error and 55 low-toner alerts sent to the team

The problem

Meter reads came from three places at once: reports printed off individual machines, emails asking customers to read their own counters, and an FMAudit subscription that cost about $560 a month.

Toner was worse. Customers without a supply contract kept no backup cartridges, so "we're out" meant a same-day rush shipment, a technician driving a cartridge over, or, if it wasn't in stock, a rush drop-ship from a distributor. Usually while the customer was trying to finish payroll or another print job that couldn't wait.

And where customers did keep backups, nobody knew what was actually on the shelf without someone going on-site to count it. Shelves filled up with toner nobody needed yet.

What changed

MeterBeam started as an in-house replacement for FMAudit, and the FMAudit subscription is now cancelled. It became more than a replacement when we added shelf stock. MeterBeam tracks the cartridges sitting on each customer's shelf, counts one down when a cartridge is swapped into a printer, and forecasts when the next order will be needed.

"Once we deployed shelf stock, it was different from all the others. It worked very well."

Michael Knipper, founder, MeterBeam

The biggest change is less money sitting on customer shelves. Across the dealer's accounts, at least $3,000 of surplus toner no longer has to be stocked, and the real figure is probably higher. There are no more on-site stock audits, and every site has a forecast of when its next supply order is due, so the team works from a schedule instead of reacting to emergencies.

"If it disappeared, it would feel like the stone age again."

About these numbers

Device and alert counts come from MeterBeam's own records for this dealer, July 7 to October 14, 2026. Alerts are alerts sent, not outages prevented: some offline alerts are simply printers that were switched off. The $3,000 overstock figure is the dealer's own conservative estimate across its customer base.

The plan they use

Dealer / Multi-Site: per-customer meter reports for contract billing, shelf stock at every customer site, and alerts across the whole book. Comparing tools? See MeterBeam vs FM Audit and what FM Audit costs.