Infographic: How Much Is Paper Costing Your Business?

Printing is expensive, but how much are printing costs for a business?

Well, print costs are something of a hidden problem for SMBs.

Many organizations have little or even no visibility into how they manage their paper consumption and printing costs, which can spiral out of control without you even knowing it.

Why is this important now?

Well, keeping on top of print costs has always been important, but a rapid proliferation in the volume of data being handled by small and midsize companies has meant that more information and documentation (and consequently paper) has been produced to accommodate it.

Related Post: Print Management: Get Ahead of the Game

How and Why Is Printing a Drain on Modern Businesses?

When we talk about businesses having a lack of visibility into managing their print costs, we’re talking principally two things—no software to measure use and a lack of a modern MFP fleet that allows the best use of this software.

The software we’re referring to are solutions like PaperCut, which help businesses manage their entire printing infrastructure by syncing all MFPs to the network and monitoring them through a centralized program.

Through programs like this, companies can manage their print expenditure by enacting policies, limits, and benchmarks to keep within a designated budget.

For businesses without any means to track and manage their output, costs add up over time until it becomes a big and unnecessary drain.

How Much Do Companies Spend on Printing?

The average employee costs $725 per year because of their printing habits.

For larger businesses, these costs can rack up substantially, and even for smaller SMBs these kinds of costs are untenable. Employees print around 9,000 pages a year and nearly one-fifth of them are not read.

As the use of big data grows, and information sets become larger and larger, printing habits in turn have changed and it’s more important than ever for decision makers to get a handle on their organization’s printing habits and have a clear understanding of what their print policies are.

If left unmanaged, printing habits can become an under-the-radar drain on a business and a costly, inhibiting expense.

We’ve put together this infographic to give you an insight into how much it’s really costing you to have an unmanaged printing infrastructure and why businesses in 2021 should seriously consider assessing their needs.

Print management is an important part of reducing costs for many small and midsize businesses that are budget-conscious and looking for ways to cut down on expenditure and their environmental impact. For more information about what print management can do for you, take a look at our Managed Print Services page and discover what you could get from a partnership with a managed service provider.