A good portion of a company’s IT budget goes to printing costs. From the paper to toner to printer maintenance, it all adds up very quickly. Sometimes toner is so expensive that it’s actually cheaper to just purchase a brand-new printer!
We’ve compiled a list of ways you can save money on printing costs:
Toner Subscriptions
Many printer manufacturers are now offering subscriptions for toner or ink to help you save money. The monthly fee for toner is usually much cheaper than paying for new toner or ink outright.
You may have to watch out when you have a subscription though. Subscription companies may limit the number of prints you can do every month to keep the same rate. Overages could get really pricey, so you need to make sure you will be able to stay within your limit.
Go Paperless
One of the best ways to reduce your printing costs is to stop printing altogether.
There are many paperless solutions that are affordable and easy to use. Printing things on paper is almost a lost art anyway. Going to a paperless solution can allow you to reduce the number of printers you have at the office, improve document workflow, and could even help your company become more compliant with government regulations.
Printers themselves can be a significant drain on the company budget, as they frequently break down and the cost of supplies can be outrageous.
A large portion of our help desk calls are printers malfunctioning. If going paperless can help you reduce those printers to just one or two in the office for those few times you need to print something, the budget will thank you.
Just so you are aware though, if you do go paperless, you will likely need to invest in a document management solution. Not only will this be a great repository for your documents, but it will also help create and maintain various workflows.
You can send a document much more quickly to someone over email than you can by walking it over to their desk. Especially in today’s distributed work environments, not all employees will be working from the office. Workflows that incorporate digital files are extremely important now.
You can also save on storage space by eliminating all of the paper files in your office. While paper might be extremely thin, a lot of paper can take up a lot of space. Just ask any law firm!
Lease Equipment
Similar to toner subscriptions, you can also lease your printing equipment. Similarly, you may be limited in the number of pages you can print during the month, but you won’t have the huge upfront cost of a large copy machine.
With a leased device, you also may not be responsible for repair costs or technical support on the machine.
I would imagine that sometime soon printing may be a thing of the past for business users. At first, we missed having CD drives in our laptops too, but we got used to it. Just don’t try to take away my headphone jack!
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