The state of the economy is not improving and businesses feel the impact. Due to this, many businesses are looking for ways to save on expenses while still selling high quality goods and services. One way to reduce office expenses is to reduce the cost of printing.
How To Save On Printing
Use one printer instead of having multiple printers in the office, you can have just one printer which can satisfy the needs of everyone in the office who uses a printer. The printer you purchase should be durable. Having one printer will enable you to save on the cost per page. The amount of money spent on buying ink/toner cartridges for each printer is definitely higher the amount of money you will spend on buying a cartridge for one printer.
Service Your Printer
Servicing a printer will enable it to continue functioning effectively. If you do not service it, it will probably not perform at its best and this may result in more money being spent on printing. It is thus advisable to always have it serviced as per the directions of the manufacturer.
Print a Draft Copy
You can save a lot of ink and printing time by printing draft copies of your document. If you are using word processing software, printing a draft copy is the best option. This option does not print graphics and some types of formatting. It is thus applicable when printing documents that are plain text.
Print Greener
You can use a rating system known as Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) which will give you a list of electronics, including printers, which are environmental friendly and are manufactured according to the design, energy use and recycling processes acceptable to EPEAT. Some of the printers registered under EPEAT have a reusable toner which enables you to erase any output and reuse it as many times as you want. This reduces paper costs that you would have incurred in case any mistakes were made while printing.
Additionally, some printers that use software that is considered green can be able to identify and remove any unnecessary pages when you send a document for printing. The software looks for characteristics of waste and highlights them.
Use The Print Preview Option
Before printing a document, preview how it will look like after it has been printed. This will enable you to see any signs of wastage such as too much spacing, extra pages with very little information or unnecessary line breaks. You can then modify the document before printing to ensure you save as many pages as possible and this will equate to saving money.
Go Digital
Instead of storing some documents in printed form, you could store them as soft copies and this will save you a lot of expenses in printing and buying printing paper. Of course, there are documents that need to be in hard copy form but reduce printing as much as you can if the information can stay or be sent as a soft copy. For example, a document that needs to be signed should not necessarily be printed. It could be signed via a tablet or a smartphone and then sent back in a few seconds or minutes.
Managed Print Service
This service will monitor and manage printing devices to help you cut printing costs. After optimizing with your printing devices, the service will give you solutions to increase efficiency and cut costs. Some print services are very effective since they charge a certain fee per copy for your printing devices and at the same time maintain your printing devices to ensure they are in good condition throughout. This option is cheaper and will save you some money which you can direct elsewhere.
Print on Both Sides
Printing on both sides of the paper reduces your printing costs by almost 50%. You can automatically change your computer’s print settings to print both pages instead of one page.
Changing Font
Although some fonts look very attractive on paper, they may cost you a lot of money in paper cost and also ink cost. Changing the font and the size of the font to something reasonable yet readable could reduce the number of papers you use to print out a certain document. You thus save in paper costs and also the amount of ink used to print the whole document.