How to Reduce Printing Costs

9 ways to save money on
office printing

A huge cost for most organisations is the cost of printing. Paper and especially ink can form a substantial part of an organisation's expenses, often running into the thousands of dollars per year.

Printing needs to be kept in check as these costs often spiral out of control, and it is a case of following these simple steps to save your organisation a lot of money. Here's 9 ways to save money on office printing:

1) Print draft quality
Most printers and a lot of programs come with a print draft quality option. It is sometimes called the Quick Print option. Always use this option for text as this uses a lot less ink and is still perfectly legible. As a bonus, printing is also faster in this mode.

2) Use laser printers
Although they cost more than inkjets, laser printers are coming down in price and if you are only interested in black and white printing, then they have a cheaper cost per page.

3) Use print houses for large runs of colour prints
Mostly it is cheaper to print in-house but if you need to print a large quantity of colour pages, it can be worth looking at online printing services that often have special offers, and a fast turnaround. Printing this way can be cheaper. This is especially the case if you want to print colour images on high quality, glossy paper.

4) Print using black and white
Colour printing is much more expensive than black and white or mono printing. For this reason, you should always print in mono unless colour is absolutely required. Often there is a setting for this under your printer’s options and preferences.

5) Print only the text you need
If you want to print a bit of text from a website, copy the text into a word processor and then print it. In Internet Explorer 8, you can select a bit of text, right click it and then print preview where you will be given the option to print only the selected text. You can also turn off print background colours and images.

If you want to print an email, make sure you only print the first page as emails can run into many pages in length after having been replied to a few times.

Always use the print preview option to make sure you are printing only the page you are interested in. This is especially the case with spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel.

6) Print many pages to the sheet
This is often called Multi-Page printing and is a common printer option where pages are shrunk down so that 2, 4 or even more pages fit onto one sheet of paper. This is very good for storage of large amounts of documents that do not have to be read too often.

7) Shrink to fit
Often a document will run onto the last page and can, with little effect to the readability of the document, be shrunk to fit a page or more less. You can often find this option of you select the print preview option first.

8) Educate staff
It is important to realise that not all staff will be computer and printer savvy. Get them to read this blog post. Give them the tips they need and the understanding of printing costs so that they will think twice, the next time they print a document.

9) Use print management software
The strongest tool in any organisation’s battle against printing costs is a print manager such as Print Manager Plus^®. With Print Manager Plus, you can track all printing that goes on in your organisation. You can limit printing by users, groups and organisation units. You can restrict printing by colour, print size, daily limits and more. An upfront investment needs to be made but the savings will quickly pay for it.

Text taken from www.reduceprintingcosts.net