Do you know how much your business spends on printing? Believe it or not, the average company spends up to three percent of its total revenue each year on document output. Naturally, within that, there is some money wasted that makes that number higher than it needs to be. While your employees have to print as part of doing their jobs, there are ways for your business to lower the costs of doing so. Try utilizing these cost-saving measures to lower your overall print spend.
After what you pay for your printers themselves, your next biggest expense would be your consumables. Namely, ink or toner and paper. You can lower how much you pay for these items by using less of them without reducing how much you print. With paper, this is possible by printing on both sides of a piece of paper. Duplex mode, a common feature on most printers today, enables you to do so without any manual intervention. Simply print in duplex mode and the device will utilize both sides of a piece of paper. You might not want to use this for certain documents, but by setting your printers to default to duplex mode and printing the majority of your documents this way you will go through half as much paper as you would otherwise. This will benefit both your budget and the environment.
You can take a similar approach with your ink or toner by printing in draft mode. For everyday printing of non-important documents, start using draft mode for print quality. Draft mode allows you to use less ink or toner to create them. While this will make the print quality less than ideal, and not something you’d use for something such as a report or a contract, the documents will be perfectly suitable for internal purposes. Set your default for draft mode and watch the savings add up. As a bonus, your documents will also be printed faster in draft mode.
Another way to save when printing is by using color only when absolutely necessary. Color printing, while possessing a powerful impact on its readers, costs more than black and white. So, while setting your other printer defaults, be sure to set the color mode to monochrome. If the need arises for a document to be printed in color, you can easily override that at the time. Otherwise, work with black and white documents to lower your overall print spend.
These simple tips can help reduce the amount of money your business spends on document output without any significant inconvenience. If you’d like to learn more ways to cut your printing costs, contact us today.
