Reduce Printing Cost in your Office

Printing cost is one of the expenses companies need to look at. Especially when you have a business that consumes a lot of printing, such as lawyers, publishers and so on.

There are many ways you can lower your printing cost. Lets name a few:

Proof check

Your proof check does not need to be on print, there are lots of new ways you can proof check without using a hard copy, which is more accurate and very efficient time wise.

If you are using tools like Adobe Acrobat, or Google Docs, Office 365 and more. These tools help you to group work on a document, or comment on a paragraph or a picture without changing the real content. They will notify you about the change and who changed it and the date it has been changed. Documents can get signed by the signing officer and get approved for the print and much more other capabilities.

If you must check print a document or a book you can setup your printer to print low-resolution photos instead of the high-resolution ones.

Do not use high-quality paper for the proof check.

Sleep mode setup

Always setup your printer on sleep mode.  When you are not using your printer it will automatically go into sleep mode and most of the parts will shut down automatically. This will help you save on electricity and depending on the printer the sleep mode will extend your printer life time too. 

Do not worry, all printers will automatically wake up when you receive fax or print so you won’t lose anything.

In some cases (mostly laser printers) it will take a little time to warm up but it won’t be that long.

Draft mode printing

In most of the printers you have print quality options like low-resolution, high-resolution, 150DPI or 300 or even 600 DPI. In some inkjet printers you have low-quality or photo-quality and so on. Some of these options use a lot of ink or toner to print a page, if you are test printing or proof check printing always choose the low-quality print option. Sometimes the low-quality option is even faster. For example in some of the inkjet printers in high quality mode the print head doubles up print to reach the highest quality possible but in low-resolution the print head just prints in one pass so you are saving on print head life time as well.

Train your Staff

Some printers have a complicated menu. For example: How to choose the print quality? or how to use duplex printing? or fit to page printing? If your staff is not trained properly or if they need to wait for the print technician to help them setup the printer, they might skip the setup and print the way it is. If it’s a test print they might print single side instead of duplex or high quality instead of low-resolution and even print one page on two papers because they do not know how to fix the print into page. So over time you are losing money on paper, on ink & toners and your printer needs maintenance more often.

So take the time to train all staff who has access to the printer.

Also we have seen many offices because the printer tray is broken and the paper jam damaged the roller. These are all human error and happens because the staff was not train properly to work with the printer.

Calling a technician is always expensive. For some of the maintenance you do not need to call the technician, you can always train yourself to maintain simple stuff using YouTube.

Always use re-manufactured or compatible Ink and Toners

Every one knows that if you want to buy original inks or toners it will be very expensive, sometimes even triple the price or more! For just about every type of printer there is a re-manufactured or compatible cartridge available. Some businesses do not want to rely on the remanufactured or compatible supplies. They do not want to interrupt their business because of defective ink or toner that they have purchased for cheap price so they pay the higher price to be safe.  They are absolutely right!  Find a reliable company which sells cartridges for the right price and stands behind of their products (you can try inkredibletoner.com).

Maintain your printer

Always keep your printer clean and nicely maintained. This will reduce paper jams, bad quality print and more importantly less maintenance cost. If you do not maintain your printer on regular bases sometimes simple small maintenance costs will end up with very high maintenance charges and even changing parts.

If you do not maintain your printer properly you will lose money on paper, ink or toner and maintenance.