Print Services
Printing costs often spiral because of bad habits. Learn these eight simple ways to reduce printing costs with our checklist.
Checklist
8 minutes
Feb 28, 2023
Businesses often spend a lot more on printing costs than they want or are even aware of. Our checklist is designed to offer you eight simple pieces of information that can help you drastically reduce the amount of money your organization is losing on print.
Is your organization losing a lot of money of printing costs? Do you have any standards or policies to keep costs under control?
Organizations spend approximately 1-3% of annual revenue on printing, and 90% of North American companies are unaware of how much they’re spending on printing. This is a significant expenditure that is too often overlooked, and in times like these, removing unwanted and unnecessary costs is critical to a modern business.
The majority of companies have no policies or tracking for their printing, resulting in it becoming something of a hidden drain on budgets and efficiency. Fortunately, much of this cost can be reduced by implementing simple company-wide print policies for employees to follow.
Not all printers are meant to handle bulk print jobs which are so frequent in office settings. Professional printers use different technology—like lasers and toner—to do their jobs more efficiently.
Printers designed for bigger files and more frequent use extend the life of ink cartridges, jam less often, are more energy efficient, and come with more customization options to reduce printing costs. Personal printers, while cheaper upfront, incur much higher costs over the long run.
Color copies can cost businesses 2-3x more per piece of paper, depending on ink usage. That may not seem like much when the cost of a print is just a few cents, but, when printing in bulk, it adds up and can quickly balloon your printing budget.
Instead, know when to simply use black and white. But don’t leave it up to your employees to decide what should be color or not. Develop company-wide guidelines on when printing in color is appropriate to keep everyone on the same page. These guidelines vary by business, but typically 99% of prints will end up being black and white when you ask the simple question: Does this need to be in color?
A simple solution, but making double-sided printing a company-wide default setting can cut your paper usage in half. This setting can be changed in the printing preferences window of a computer and should be implemented across your entire organization.
Did you know that the Arial font uses 27% more ink than Times New Roman? It’s not something you’d typically think about when drumming up ways to save money but, believe it or not, the size and boldness of your chosen font can end up costing you more.
Thinner fonts like Courier New, Garamond, and Ryman Eco printed more pages before ink began to run dry, each one nearly 100 pages more than Calibri, the default font on Microsoft Word!
Similarly to color printing, questions about an employee’s actual needs can be asked about printing in general. Do you have to print this document? Could this be an email? So much printed material goes unread and unused after being printed.
We all know people who print entire 10-page documents just because they need the first or first few pages. Most poor printing is simply done by habit, so organizations that make a concerted effort to break these habits and implement more eco-friendly printing practices will see bigger savings.
Rather than make dozens or hundreds of copies to share, try scanning documents to share digitally instead. Digital copies are cheaper to send (via email or physical mail) and you can then make unlimited versions of the original document which is stored in a document management system for later use.
But there is a more radical option…
There are ways to reduce printing costs, but there’s only one way to entirely eliminate them and that’s eliminating your need for paper altogether. Going paperless in your business is cost-effective, environmentally friendly, and probably easier than you think.
Applications like PandaDoc make signatures and document editing easy, you can scan papers using your phone, and document management is easier (and more secure) than ever. A document management system gives businesses one place where all of their digital documents are stored together. This makes them easier to find, simple to share with anyone in an organization, secure, and you can even automate processes to notify people when work is done or needs approval.
Related Case Study: Document Management in the Chemical Manufacturing Industry
If you’re not ready for absolute paperless, you can tip your toe into the water by giving your team some recommendations for when to use a digital document over a real one.
No matter which solutions you decide to use to control your printing costs, it helps to get expert advice both on your ongoing printing strategy and on how to get the best machines for your unique needs.
A managed print services partner, like Impact, can provide access to specialists and technicians, a selection of top-of-the-line office machines, and ongoing support to keep things printing effectively.
Certain industries, by their very nature, require more paper than others. Discover how you can reduce printing costs if your company specifically operates in one of the following industries:
Educational institutions use far more paper than organizations in any other industry. Between records like report cards, homework assignments, research papers, tests, and handouts, among all of the other documents that get produced, printing for schools is big business.
The average school consumes 360,000 pages per year.
Luckily, there are a couple of print management best practices that education industry organizations can adopt to reduce the cost.
The first is to install software that manages which people are allowed to actually use printers and where they have to be. If printers are intended for teacher use, students shouldn’t be relying on them for their homework and personal projects. And if you have identity verification that ensures a print job only begins when you reach the printer, you can’t waste paper by sending a document to the wrong device.
Fleet optimization is also a crucial element of print management in education. The odds are high that not every classroom and administrative office has to have its own printer. If you’re strategic about where in schools print devices are placed, you have to pay for fewer machines, and both teachers and students will have fewer opportunities to carelessly print documents.
In the legal industry, printing almost everything is typically a given. Lawyers and law firms are subject to strict regulations about how clients, courts, and opposing counsel can receive information, necessitating physical versions of most documents. There are a few things companies in this field can do to lower the impact this has on their bottom line, though.
The first element of managed legal printing services is ensuring that you’re not using expensive materials when you don’t have to. Documents may have to be physical, but they don’t need specialty paper, and they don’t have to be in color ink. Unless the settings are adjusted, even if you’re printing a basic document, it might come out in a very dark and costly color instead of cheaper black ink.
Additionally, if you’re in the legal industry, your printing should all be double-sided to cut the amount of paper you use in half. If you have a fleet that doesn’t allow for easy double-sided printing, it’s time to consider switching up your print management.
The odds are high that you’re accustomed to going to a doctor’s appointment and immediately being presented with a form to fill out or sign. And if you ever have to spend a night in the hospital, you’ve probably had your paper chart hanging on a clipboard by your bed. In healthcare, printing is unavoidable.
But with digital transformation in healthcare, there are more apps than ever that can replace paper documents while still being simple, intuitive, and HIPAA-compliant for doctors who don’t have the time to learn technology as well as medicine. Patient portals allow you to securely store health information and share it only with the people who need it, drastically reducing the need for paper.
Healthcare printing can also be avoided with digital document management. Instead of relying on paper across the board, even when patients sometimes need physical documents, the administrative side of running a health-based company can all be done digitally, making business easier, faster, and cheaper.
The financial services industry is a little behind the times when it comes to printing. While the technology exists to securely store and transfer financial information, it’s such a heavily regulated field that paper is required to stay compliant. And even when that’s not the case, many consumers just feel more comfortable with printed documentation.
That means the first step to financial printing cost savings is education. Helping your clients understand when they do and don’t need a paper trail will lead more of them to opt into paperless billing, meaning you won’t need to print as many statements and mail them out every month.
Education also extends to your employees. When they understand exactly which regulations apply to your organization and what is required to stay compliant with them, they’ll know what they do and don’t have to print. That knowledge allows you to keep more of your files digital, rather than printing all financial documents as the default.
Finally, financial services printer fleet management necessitates considering printer security. If your equipment connects to your wi-fi, hackers can use it to access the rest of your network. Cybersecurity is a different printing consideration than paper consumption, but being fined or sued for not properly protecting sensitive information as you’re printing it can also become a sizable cost!
There are two ways in which printing in real estate eats up money:
For the first, many of the best methods for reducing print cost have already been covered earlier in this blog. Managing who is allowed to print, adjusting printer settings to default to black and white and double-sided printing, and optimizing your printer fleet will all have an impact on your bottom line.
For the second, however, there’s a different option entirely for real estate printing: print production. Instead of outsourcing the printing of all your flyers, brochures, and other marketing materials, you can get a solution that allows you to create them in-house.
This ultimately saves money when you produce a high volume of materials because you can print exactly what you need, exactly when you need it. You can create it to your exact specifications. You never have to print more than you need to hit a minimum order. And you can easily adjust if you ever notice an error in something that has already been produced.
Businesses spend a lot of cash on printing every year (over $700 per person). Whether it’s wasteful printing habits, too much color printing, or inefficient machines, businesses can take control of this often-overlooked office habit to save more money and materials, and become more eco-friendly.
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