Small to medium businesses are highly susceptible to increasing operational costs. In some cases, small price increases for essential items can be enough to force a company out of business. That’s why savvy business owners are always on the search for ways to cut costs. One often overlooked cost-saving tactic is to reduce the costs associated with your printers.

Here are six ways to cut printing costs.

1. Print double sided – While printer paper isn’t overly expensive – an average of $8 per ream (for 500 sheets of non-recycled, multipurpose paper) – many companies only print on one side. This really adds up over a year, especially if you have more than one printer or print large documents on a regular basis. To save money, set your printers and software to print on both sides of the page. This will cut down the amount of paper used and waste generated. Just be sure to put page numbers on the documents so readers know it’s double sided.
2. Lower print quality – Most printers can print at various quality levels. Higher quality means it’s easier to read, but uses more ink. If you are printing out memos or other inter office documents, you probably don’t need high, or even medium quality. Low quality is still readable and will save you on ink costs.
3. Print in black – Ink is by far the highest cost of any printing job, and supplies always seems to deplete quickly. To save money, set up your printers to print using only black ink, which is about 30% cheaper than color ink.
4. Implement print quotas – Nothing makes an environmentalist cringe more than seeing a 100-page PDF freshly printed, and lying in the recycle bin because someone accidentally printed the whole document instead of just one page. Not only is this bad for the environment, it’s bad for your bottom line. One way around this is to use quotas. Many new printers allow you to assign ID’s and quotas to computers or workers. This will encourage employees to think twice before printing.
5. Go paperless – With the introduction of cheap cloud storage and collaboration services, the paperless office has become mostly viable. Granted there are some aspects of business, like shipping waybills, receipts, payslips, etc., that must legally be printed, but you can move non-essential documents onto cloud storage. This is a great way to reduce printing costs, while simultaneously fostering a sharing and collaborative office environment.
6. Work with managed print services – If you find that printing costs are skyrocketing, why not work with a managed print services provider? The vast majority charge a flat fee and will take care of your printers, and often your ink too.

Unless you adopt massive changes, like completely getting rid of all printers, you won’t see huge savings from reducing printing costs. However, every little bit counts. If you’re looking for a managed print services company or for more ways to reduce your IT costs, please contact us today.