Despite the digital era in which we find ourselves, printing remains a major business activity that is intertwined with daily operations and workflows. That being said, it’s vital for organizations to understand the cost of printing so they can properly allocate budget, time, and resources.
While printing costs might seem like a little bit of a mystery, or even a negligible expense for which you don’t need to account, these daily activities can quickly add up to surprising levels. By taking the time to really understand how much printing activities cost your business, you’ll be able to conduct a cost-benefit analysis, reduce waste, and streamline processes, all-in-all resulting in major savings.
Many organizations have little or even no visibility into how they manage their paper consumption and printing costs, both of which can quickly spiral out of control without anyone even realizing.
As organizations continue to focus on standing out in a hyper-competitive marketplace, having a granular understanding of your expenses will allow you to dedicate resources where they’re needed most.
Additionally, with the volume of data being handled by organizations growing so rapidly, more documentation, and in turn, more printing activities have come about. Let’s take a closer look at how printing costs are influencing your operations.
If you need help identifying, understanding, and analyzing your printing habits and costs, consider the benefits of a strategic partnership with a managed print services provider!
How and Why Is Printing a Drain on Modern Businesses?
When we talk about lack of visibility into print habits and costs, we’re talking principally about two things—a lack of measurement software and the lack of modern business equipment fleet that enables the best use of this software.
The software we’re referring to include solutions like PaperCut, which helps businesses manage their entire printing infrastructure by syncing all MFPs to the network and monitoring them through a centralized program.
With this type of program in place, companies can manage their print expenses by designing and installing policies, creating print limits, and developing budget benchmarks to keep everything on track.
For businesses without the means to track and manage their printing output, costs can add up over time and end up becoming a major obstacle in both operations and budgeting.
How Much Do Companies Spend on Printing?
The printing habits of the average employee measure in around $725/year.
For any business, these costs snowball and compile over time, and if left unchecked, can easily become untenable. These costs are even harder to swallow when you consider that employees print around 9,000 pages a year and nearly 20% of them go completely unread.
As the use of big data grows, and information sets become larger, printing habits in turn have changed and it’s more important than ever for decision-makers to get a handle on their organization’s printing habits and have a clear understanding of what their print policies are.
If left unmanaged, printing habits can become an undetected issue that.
We’ve put together this infographic to give you an insight into how much your printing habits are really costing you and how these additional expenses are hindering your ability to invest in other initiatives aimed at business growth.