Unmanaged printing expenses can add up to be between 1% to 3% of an organization’s total revenue. According to Keypoint Intelligence, 90 percent of companies fail to track their printing costs. This means many organizations are missing out on the significant savings associated with print costs and environment management.
Calculating your current cost-per-print provides a starting point for your organization’s overall print costs for each printer, copier, wide or small. It will provide a snapshot of how much it costs you to print on each device and it will provide a baseline for understanding how much your organization pays to print (on a daily, weekly, monthly or annual basis, depending on your calculations).
Upon first consideration, you might think all print expenses are obvious: equipment, service and supplies. However, these expenses only paint part of the picture. True print costs also include the soft costs: employee burden rates and lifecycle of the equipment.
- Equipment: cost of acquisition, which may be a purchase price, lease or cost-per-copy agreement.
- Supplies: ongoing expense that includes toner, developer, paper and other print media, staples and more.
- Service/Maintenance: monthly service agreements or one-time maintenance charges.
- Burden Rates: the time spent for employees to fix equipment, order supplies, schedule maintenance, etc.
- Lifecycle of Equipment: depreciation plus the availability of new, better technology.
Gathering this information can be time consuming but it is essential for understanding exactly what you pay for printing every month.
