Develop Your Business Brain

Printing costs contribute significantly to the annual expenditure in offices. You have to invest in printers, service them regularly and buy ink and paper. Unfortunately, in an office setting, it is hard to dictate how your employees use printing equipment. Some print documents and forget to retrieve them from the machine. Others print on one side and misuse paper. If you aren't careful, the overall printing costs can be unreasonably high. Luckily, you can take the following measure to manage and reduce printing costs in your office.

1.     Move to Networked Printers

Personal printers are expensive to maintain, as you have to buy ink and paper for each one of them. What's more, employees tend to misuse them by reprinting documents and accidentally reproducing documents in bulk. Avoid this problem by ditching personal printers and moving to shared ones. Place the networked printer in an open place where they are easily accessible. Networked printers eliminate additional maintenance costs. Also, the idea of sharing printers kills the incentive to misuse them, and the result is reduced ink and paper usage.

2.     Adopt a Digital Document Imaging System

Today's printers have incredible capabilities such as the ability to print and store documents in local drives. This feature is known as a digital document imaging system. If your printers don't have it, you can use a special connector to link the printers to your enterprise content management software. The digital document imaging feature reduces print documents by making it possible for employees to scan and store documents digitally. You not only save on filing space but also reduce the amount of ink and paper used by your employees.

3.     Adjust Printer Settings

Sometimes all you need to do is make some few changes to your printer settings, and you could save several hundred dollars every year on ink and paper. For example, most employees forget to change default print settings from "single-side" to "double-side," and this leads to paper wastage. Change this setting to "double-side," and you will be using 50% less paper in the office. Also, change the printing font to one that uses less ink. For example, Times New Roman uses less ink as compared to the standard Arial font. Making such non-disruptive changes can give you decent savings on office printing every year.

Conclusion

A lot of money is spent every year on buying office paper and ink and maintaining and servicing printers. Reducing these costs can lead to significant annual savings. Luckily, you don't have to do something crazy like enforcing paper quotas. These subtle changes can go a long way in cutting down printing costs and improving the efficiency of your printers.