How to Determine the Costs Associated with Your Printing

Sad to say, but for the foreseeable future, cost control is going to be the number one priority for almost every business. With the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic still lingering, and revenue streams interrupted, many businesses are still being extremely cautious with their capital. One place where most businesses can cut back is on printing. Let’s discuss how to cut your organization’s printing costs. 

Outlining the Metric That Will Save You Money

If yours is a business that typically relies heavily on printing, you probably pay a lot for ink/toner. It makes up for a large portion of any business’ printing costs. If your business uses color printers, this cost skyrockets. A metric that can help you ascertain exactly what your printing costs are is cost-per-page. It basically takes all your print-related costs and divides it by the number of prints you can get with all your printing resources.

How to Calculate the Average Cost-Per-Page

To calculate the average cost per printed page all you need to do is divide the price of your ink/toner by the cartridge yield rating. This can be found on the packaging. 

$22 on a cartridge of black ink with a yield of 518 pages, your formula would look like this...

22/518 = 0.042

...giving you a cost of about 4 cents per page.

Of course, not all ink cartridges you use are the same. Your organization may have several different types of printers that use different types of ink/toner. In calculating the total cost per page, you will be confronted with all of your different ink/toner purchases, your hardware costs, your maintenance costs, the cost to run the machine, and the paper you are using. That makes the equation much more difficult to solve, especially as the number of variables increases. All told, if you aren’t actively looking to manage your printing costs, it can come in at something like $.10 per page. That adds up quickly.

Controlling Printing Costs

For organizations that depend on their printers and their printed resources, the best way to manage all the moving parts is by integrating a print management solution. With a print management system, you can actively control your printing costs by dictating who can print on certain machines, what they can print, and even provide an option to limit a specific user’s printer access. 

Another way to cut down on your printing costs is to deploy a document management system. These systems, typically used by organizations that are looking to go paperless, allow an organization to digitize all documents. This means that you are printing less but retaining all the valuable information that you would have typically filed away in a metal filing cabinet someplace in your office. With document management, you can have access to any document in your database at any time, on nearly every device. It also allows your company to reduce its carbon footprint.

If you are looking for a way to control your printing costs, or if you just want to remove a few shekels from your technology expenses, call the knowledgeable consultants at Washington Works today at 301-571-5040.