Five tips to reduce the cost of printing at your workplace

Although companies have mostly moved to a digital environment, printing still remains an essential part of daily operations in many businesses. However, it can become costly. 

If you are worried about your business costs in relation to printing, we’ve outlined several tips below you can use to cut down on printing costs.

Keep your document digital

Unless you need a hard copy of your document, you should always opt to use digital documents. Instead of printing once you have finished your document, save it as a PDF. 

Rather than handing out a mass of sheets of paper to your staff, you can simply email it to them instead in one concise document, or upload it to a shared drive available for everyone to access. This is especially useful in meetings, as team members can follow along in meetings on their laptops or tablets rather than shuffling through pieces of paper.  

You can even do signatures electronically. This means there is no need to print and potentially have to send documents to another person. Instead you can just email it across to them, and request it to be signed and emailed back. 

Print in only black and white

The majority of the time, you will only ever need to print in black and white (mono printing) and it should ideally be the default setting on your printer. Using coloured ink is far more expensive than mono ink, and therefore you could be raking up your printing costs without even knowing.

Even printing a page which has one email hyperlink in blue on it will cost you in colour printing. That can become particularly  pricey if you use external printing services. You should consider the pages that you do print in colour and evaluate if it is actually necessary. Most of the time, the documents will be thrown away after they’ve been used. 

A simple modification on the digital document to remove any coloured elements, such as text boxes, will help you save money when printing.

Hire a rental printer 

When you buy a printer or photocopier, you become tied to that machine until you decide to upgrade or sell it. By renting a printer or photocopier, it gives you far greater flexibility than buying your own machine. 

You can also avoid the costly hassles of trying to sell your old machine to upgrade to a new one, as rental printers are easily swapped and upgraded to newer models that can handle your specific printing requirements. 

The value for money you receive when using rental printers and photocopiers means you are able to allocate funds more effectively and focus on spending your capital on more effective products that would be beneficial in buying rather than renting.

Always preview before you print 

Before you print, you should always scan over your document and the document settings to ensure everything is correct and there aren’t any unnecessary gaps or blocks of colour. You should try and fit your content on as few pages as possible with a reduced amount of space between each section of your document. 

Always check for typos and errors in the margins or spacing so you don’t have to reprint your document. Continuously reprinting can increase costs quickly, so it’s always best to check for errors on screen rather than off-screen.

Reduce the amount of printers in your space

How many printers you have in your office space can drastically increase your spending on printing costs. You could take measures into your own hands, or you could hire a print service team to conduct a print environment assessment to see what could be altered in your office space. 

You may actually get told you have too many printers for the amount of team members in the office. Instead of personal printers, you can set up printing stations that are communal and strategically placed around the office to suit the needs of everyone. 

This may also encourage team members to consider if they actually need to print, by forcing them to get up to collect their printed documents. 

Moving away from printing can be difficult if it is something your company has always done, but following these steps can help push you in the right direction towards cutting down unnecessary costs. A first step can simply be selling your old printer and moving to rentals, or even just encouraging your team to only print in black and white.