Printing costs can take a surprisingly heavy toll on a business, but there is much that can be done to drastically reduce the overall expense. The following six ideas will help reduce your company’s printing expenses dramatically by implementing some simple changes in your daily activities.
Six Ideas to Slash Printing Costs
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- Utilize draft quality printing whenever possible, and switch fonts for regular documents.
Documents that are not required for legal purposes, as well as those that will not be stored or shared with customers, can be printed in draft mode to save toner and electricity. If you find that the quality of documents printed in draft mode is too poor ever for inter-office use, consider purchasing the inexpensive EcoPrint 2 software program which allows you to select the amount of toner reduction to provide an ideal balance of lighter print with ease of readability. When you must print in regular mode, Times New Roman or Century Gothic are a couple of fonts that are lighter on toner usage. - Print in color only when necessary. Pages printed in color can cost as much as 40% more than black and white versions, take longer to print, and use more electricity. Save color printing for important client documents.
- Reduce the number of pages printed. Use email as much as possible and only print any pages you actually need vs. an entire document. Increase scanning to use less paper, while simutalneously creating electronic data back up. Scans are also easy to share electronically.
- Switch to a centralized, energy efficient printer.
Desktop printers use more energy and typically have fewer features than the newer, Energy Star models, so consider switching over to a centralized printer to reduce electricity usage, and provide users far more features than their older desktop versions. Personal printers can lead to tremendous waste in not only paper, but ink. Centralizing printing to a single machine will reduce material use as well as potential repair work. - Utilize both sides of the paper, and print more than one page per side.Duplex printing alone can cut printer usage in half; shrinking pages to fit more than one page per side will slash use further.
- Hire a Managed Print Service (MPS) to oversee your printing usage.In some cases, this step alone can reduce your overall printing costs by as much as 30%! Preventative printer maintenance and monitoring will reduce downtime and virtually eliminate print related help desk calls. Utilizing a MPS, which keeps track of the actual number of pages printed by each machine, also can help shed light on how much paper and toner use occurs within your company on a daily basis.
- Utilize draft quality printing whenever possible, and switch fonts for regular documents.
Simple Changes Make Big Impacts
When your company is serious about reducing printer costs, small changes go a long way towards sustainability. A Managed Print Service provided through Great Lakes Computer may assist you in this task; we can also help you with any of your other printing needs.
