Better Understand What Your Business Is Paying for Printing

With businesses actively searching for ways to cut costs in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, one place a lot of businesses are considering cutting is their printing initiatives. Today, there are several new solutions that can provide businesses options without having to rely on printed materials. If your business is one that cannot, however, you should know just how much your printer is costing your business. In today’s blog, we’ll review how you can calculate this investment.

The Cost-Per-Page Metric Is Crucial to Identify

Printing costs are typically tied up in ink/toner. That’s not the only cost, but unless you are using premium paper to print out sales and marketing reports or the company newsletter, it is the major one. For color printers, it’s an even larger expense since you typically need multiple toner cartridges to get the desired effect. This is why knowing what your organization is paying per page to print is so crucial. It’s a pretty straightforward equation.

How to Calculate the Average Cost-Per-Page

To calculate the average cost per printed page all you need to do is divide the price of your ink/toner by the cartridge’s yield rating. This can be found on the packaging. 

$40 on a cartridge of black ink with a yield of 525 pages, your formula would look like this...

40/525 = 0.076

...giving you a cost of about 8 cents per page.

Of course, not all ink cartridges are the same, printers aren’t always efficient. Some printers require more cartridges than others. Calculating the total cost of printing per page when you use multiple printers and multiple types of printers may get difficult. It will basically require finding the cost and yield rating for each cartridge, doing that math, and then adding in the cost to run the printer, the paper costs, and any other time and materials used. After it is all said and done, it can be upwards of $.10 a page. That type of cost isn’t doing your business any favors. 

Controlling Your Printing Costs

Today, there are print management platforms that can dictate who can print materials on which machine, and even give them a maximum number of prints in a given time period. Controlling your printing costs takes diligence and oversight. 

Today, there are plenty of digital solutions that can help eliminate a lot of the printing costs your organization has to deal with. There are document management platforms that file your digital files as documents, providing a way to basically eliminate printing costs. There are other paperless office initiatives that can deliver cost stabilization and even reduce your company’s carbon footprint.

At White Mountain IT Services, we can help your business cut down or eliminate printing costs and present you with a more dynamic way to share and send documents. Call us today at 603-889-0800 to learn more.