How to Minimize Your Printer’s Impact on Your Budget

For all the paperless solutions that are available, we understand that some businesses still rely on printed hardcopy documentation. This doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t ways that you can optimize your printing habits, saving your business a pretty penny in the process.

Here, we’ll review a few of these approaches to help you better manage your office’s printing tendencies.

Putting a Print Policy Together

Naturally, any approach you leverage should be compiled into a document that outlines how your staff should be using the printers at their disposal. This policy should include the following considerations:

• How many prints each department/user should make in a given period of time.
• Which documents can be printed in color, and which should remain in greyscale.
• Which documents should be produced in hardcopy, and which can remain digital.
• Which pages from a given document actually need to be printed, and which can be omitted from the hardcopy.
• The cases in which double-sided printing is an option.
• Whether or not a document has received an initial proofreading.

Naturally, these guidelines should be just that - preferable ranges, rather than hard and fast rules. You never know when your business processes may suddenly require quite a bit of printed hardcopies, so don’t hamstring yourself by limiting your capability. Having said that, it is important to acknowledge that placing limits on things like printing caps has been shown to naturally reduce the amount of printing that actually takes place, saving you a bit of capital through awareness alone.

Using Network Printers with Print Management Software

Accomplishing this organic decrease in printing can be as simple as implementing a few inorganic solutions. Instead of investing the kind of money needed for each employee to have their own, self-managed printer, it is almost certainly more economical to invest in a network-attached printer that the entire office can share use of. The other benefit of these printers is that you are able to examine your company’s printing habits and identify any waste that is occurring - plus, it reduces the number of devices that will potentially need to be repaired at some point down the line.

In short, there are a lot of reasons that it still makes sense to keep a printer in the office. For assistance in properly setting one up on your network, SCW is here to help. Reach out to us at (509) 534-1530 to learn more.