Controlling Color Means Controlling Costs

When you begin the task of managing your print costs, there are many things to consider looking at. Some of these things include looking at printer utilization, number of printers, efficiency of printers, the repair record of your printer(s) and finally, an often forgotten area is to look at who can print in color.

Managing print is our business. We work with companies to help develop strategies to improve control and reduce the cost of a print fleet. Our team helps to set up rules for printing that can save your company money and headaches when it comes to your print environment.

In this article we will go over ways to control color as a major way to affect cost savings for your business as it pertains to your monthly print bill.

Limit Access to Color

The first thing you can do is to choose what users or what departments should be allowed to print in color. When you are able to determine who should be able to print in color, you are able to set up print rules which can restrict users from printing in color in the first place. For example, maybe you determine it makes sense for the marketing team to be able to print in color, but the accounting team should print in black and white. These sorts of decisions can be made at the driver level or through advanced software like Papercut.

We help companies determine who should have the access and then help ensure the rules that are desired are then followed. If you have 5 people in accounting each doing 10 sheets of color per day all year and color is 10 cents a page, this one decision will save $5 per day times 200+ days, so it would save the company over $1000 per year. If the accountants are doing 100 pages a day, the same choice saves $10,000 a year. The more people print in color, the more these decisions are important to be included in a managed print strategy to serve your company in the long run.

Charge Clients for Color Used to Support Them

Another effective strategy we have helped clients implement is to have a print code for each customer, and then at the end of the month run a report and charge clients for the prints (color) that were used to service their account.

This is a common practice for accountants and attorneys. As an example, they might charge 20 cents a page if they are billed 10 cents a page and the extra 10 cents a page can be used to finance the copier or the printer so that print ends up having a net zero internal cost to the company.

If you would like to chat and strategize about how to set rules and restrictions on your printers, we would love to help you come up with a game plan that will help you save money or be able to recoup the money that is being spent on printing, specifically on your color printing.

Give our team a call and we will help you get your printing to be a better value and at a cost for your company by deploying sensible and consistent rules across your organization. We would love to help you offload your print management and we will help deploy drivers and devices to support your goals as you move forward in your business.