Are Your Printing Expenses Secretly Out of Control?

How often have you thought about how much money your printer is eating? Today’s blog will help your organization save as much money as possible on printing costs so that you can cut down on the waste your business suffers from. It all starts with calculating the individual cost of each of your pages.

But Why?
Chief among the printer’s operational costs is the cost per page. This includes the costs for ink and paper. Ink is generally distributed in cartridges, which will need to be replaced frequently to preserve print quality. These cartridges aren’t cheap, and the cost will depend on the type of printer you use and the type of documents you print with them. Depending on what you print, you could be looking at considerably higher costs compared to what someone else might consider “normal” printer usage.

Determining the cost-per-page, or CPP, is extremely important to ensure that you get the best deal for your business’ printing needs. If there is a heavy loss per page, you’ll spend more on printing than necessary, creating a negative return on investment.

Calculating Your Average Cost Per Page
The calculation for CPP is simple, but it will vary depending on the type of cartridge you are using. Basically, all you need to do is divide the price of the cartridge by the cartridge yield rating (the approximate number of pages the cartridge will print). For example, let’s say that you spend $25 on a cartridge of black ink that will get you 525 pages. You plug this into the calculation like so:

25/525 = 0.048

This cost in this case is about 5 cents per page.

Calculating the CPP of Complicated Printers
Depending on the ink cartridge, you might have a couple extra steps involved in this process. Each individual cartridge has a different color (black, cyan, yellow, and magenta), or there may be two cartridges that cover them all (black and cyan, yellow, magenta). The calculation will be mostly the same, but you have to make a couple of small adjustments to account for the colors.

When you add colors into the mix, you need to use the CPP of each individual color and add it to the total. Printing in color, as expected, costs more than if you were to just print in black ink.

Plus, consider that ink manufacturers will base the yield rating on the traditional standardized documents that most businesses will use. This means that the yield isn’t an accurate description for how much you will get from each cartridge--at least, not for every single business. It’s merely an average. Therefore, it’s critical that you round up when in doubt.

Controlling Your Printing
If you can successfully calculate how much ink your business uses, you have the opportunity to optimize its use and save considerable amounts of capital for other purposes.

SCW can help you do this. We can provide you with printing solutions so that you can keep your organization’s printing problems under control. For example, we can set up printing quotas and reports so that you can see which specific individuals need to scale back on the printing. To learn more, reach out to us at (509) 534-1530.