Printer tips for business – reduce costs by 30-50%

Business Meeting

Your business can cut in-house printing and copying costs by 30-50% and create a secure print network, by implementing a few simple tips and rules to change the way you and your people work.

Our audit team have worked with businesses, of all sizes, across Gibraltar and have compiled these top tips – No matter what the size of the business, we see these same issues resulting in businesses spending £1,000s of pounds per year that are just not necessary.

So if you’re looking at cutting costs in your business and ensuring the highest levels of data security, read on.

Printer Tips 1 – Stop printing the most expensive document in your business

The most expensive document you’ll ever print – is the document never collected from the printer.

When we conduct print audit’s, both we and businesses are astounded at the scale of uncollected documents. Save paper and ink either by reminding staff to question themselves before they print or find out about HP Printer Access Controls that provide centralised controls.

You can discover how big an issue uncollected documents are in your business by collating them for two weeks to see how much has been generated. If you’re like most businesses – you will be shocked.

Here’s how one business is seeing the benefits of HP Access Controls…

Printer Tips 2 – Limit the use of colour printing/copying in your business

Replacing colour cartridges is probably the most costly element of running in-house printers and copiers – and it’s often not necessary. Implement a policy that says the default print choice should be black and white is a practical and simple solution.

As part of our print audits we identify how many pages a business currently prints in colour and how many in mono. Working with you we can calculate how much you could save in expensive colour ink costs by moving to a fixed cost per page Managed Print Service.

Printer Tips 3 – Legacy printed quarterly, monthly and weekly reports

Most businesses are surprised at the number of legacy reports produced by staff across the business. These reports can run into several pages and include a wealth of colour graphs and tables. Even if the reports are still used by some staff – are all recipients still using them? Maybe the reports have been superceeded and no one has remembered to let the person who produces them religiously each month, that they’re no longer needed.

Often the most efficient and process driven businesses find that pages and pages of reports are being printed each week/month/quarter.

  • Are they still relevant and read?
  • Are they double sided or single side print?
  • Are they printed in colour when black and white is fine?
  • Do they need to be printed at all?

Printed reports still have a place… but with live analytics, online meetings and data security most businesses are rationalising their printed reports.

Printer Tips 4 – Prevent HR documents, Pay Slips and client information printing to unattended printers.

We’ve all heard of the horrors of documents being printed and left on unintended printers or being picked up and read by the wrong person. Check where your sensitive data is being printed or copied – it’s not just about shredding.

If printed information is sensitive to your business then you should have ‘at printer authentication’ set-up on your printer network – or find out about switching to an HP print environment that delivers this feature. Authenticated printing.

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If you print over 1,000 sheets a month in your business and you’re based in Gibraltar, you’re eligible for a free print audit. Contact the team on