Is Your Business Spending Too Much on Printing?

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Is Your Business Spending Too Much on Printing?
Ensuring running costs are kept as low as possible has always been a key factor in managing a successful business. However, in today’s rather uncertain financial climate, saving money wherever possible has become more important than ever. Obviously, there are various costs associated with running a successful business, with some easier to measure than others. It is the difficult-to-measure hidden costs that can truly undermine a business’s performance. One of these problem areas is printing.

What Is a Print Audit?

In its simplest form, a print audit works out the overall cost of printing over a determined period of time. By drilling down to the core and analysing how much it costs for an organisation to print a single page, both in black and white and colour, it then becomes possible to identify just how much that organisation actually spends on the entire printing process.

After using print audit services, many organisations are surprised by just how much is spent on the printing. After all, the printing process is a necessary function that is taken for granted. There are not too many businesses out there which possess the time, or indeed the inclination, to study printing expenditure. Even if they did find the time and manpower to research printing costs, it would be extremely difficult to obtain any truly accurate figures. To get a clearer picture of just how much of an organisation’s money is ploughed into printing, it is better to utilise the services of print audit professionals.

Print audits which are carried out in-house will normally only take into account a number of factors. These are the cost factors which are easy to spot, such as money spent on printer cartridges, ink and paper. While all of these contribute to the overall expense, the true cost of the printing process is still a long way from being established. It is the costs which usually remain hidden from the human eye which have the potential to cause the most damage to a business’s bottom line. These hidden costs are estimated to account for over half of a company’s printing expenditure. So just what are these hidden costs and how can they be readily identified?

The Hidden Costs of Printing

Hidden printing costs include, but are not limited to, maintenance of the network and printing infrastructure, the printing of colour documents when black and white would suffice and the actual energy-efficiency of each printing machine. In a large organisation, it is almost impossible for management to accurately monitor how many sheets of paper are being printed per day and whether that number could actually be reduced without impacting on productivity.