If your business is like most, you’re investing much more than you realize on printing, copying, faxing, scanning, and distributing information. Nine out of ten North American companies don’t track their print expenses, and have no idea that print expenses are probably taking up 40% of their budget.
If you aren’t tracking your print costs, you might be shocked to find out how much you’re spending. But if you don’t even know where your money is going in the first place, it’s pretty tough to save. Your first step towards eliminating wasteful spending is getting a print assessment.
What Is a Print Assessment?
A print assessment is a thorough evaluation of your printing environment, and includes the devices you’re using and their performance, what you’re printing, who’s doing the majority of the printing, and how much it’s actually costing you. 
How Can A Print Assessment Help Your Business?
While an in-depth print assessment may take some time, in the end, it’s worth it. A thorough print assessment can help your organization achieve the following:
- Save money on your printing costs
- Streamline equipment types to reduce supply and service costs
- Save office space and improve workflow by consolidating products
- Increase efficiencies through added features and benefits
- Increase productivity and user satisfaction
- Make it easier to plan for future expansion and technology
Easy Money-Savings Ideas
There are many ways to save money on printing costs, and if you aren’t doing them already, an assessment will bring these options to light. They may be as simple as changing your default settings from color print to black and white or one-sided print to two.
Printing in black and white is much cheaper than printing in color, and printing two-sided could cut your paper spending in half. It can be that simple, but sometimes it’s the easiest solutions that are also the easiest to overlook.
Don't Forget To Evaluate Your Equipment
An assessment will help you discover what types of printing your company does on a daily basis, and if your current equipment is the right fit. For example, if you’re mostly printing text documents with inkjet printers, a laser printer or multifunction device would be more cost-effective. In general, using a single multifunction device instead of multiple devices can also save on energy costs, simplify service and supply ordering, and free up quite a bit of space.
During your assessment, you might have discovered that one or more of your printing devices is over seven years old. If so, there’s no reason to wonder when you should upgrade; do it now. A printer that’s over seven years old does not have the cybersecurity tools necessary to safeguard your data.
Older printers also don’t have important time-saving features, like being able to email directly from your printer. Newer printers are also better at using toner and energy more efficiently, and can cut your cost-per-page by up to 50%.
Saving Is Easier With Managed Print Services
You can absolutely conduct a print assessment yourself. But your time is also very valuable, and it might be better spent on other tasks. Marco’s print experts can conduct a thorough assessment as part of our Managed Print Services, so you can start saving money sooner.
A highly-regarded Managed Print Service (MPS) provider like Marco can also manage your entire fleet, monitor and order your supplies automatically, provide help desk support, and upgrade your printer security, while saving you up to 30% on print costs. If you’re curious, you can check out case studies like this one, where Marco’s print experts have been saving a local college around $200,000 every year.
