Printing, copying and scanning costs represent some of the most common office overheads, continuing to drain workplace resources year after year. Cutting these costs can improve the profitability of the office, and simultaneously offer environmental benefits.

The following tips can help your office reduce office printing costs, without compromising the quality of the workplace’s output.

1. Considered investment

In the long term, investing in an energy and consumption-conscious printer could save the office significant funds. Look out for accreditations such as Energy Star and Blue Angel – these represent machines with high energy efficiency standards. The more energy efficient the printer, the lower the energy consumption and monthly bills, helping the office save money.

Printer specialist, Printerland explains, ‘Energy-saving features on accredited printers such as deep sleep modes can help users save money every single day.’

2. Dedicated printers

If your office requires a machine to complete a wide range of print jobs, it may make financial sense to invest in separate printers, dedicated to specific jobs. A top-of-the-range printer may be capable of completing high quality print jobs, but may consume more power during the basic, high-volume jobs.

Whilst unable to complete the high quality jobs with the same level of performance, a workhorse printer could complete the high-volume jobs at a low cost. Investing in dedicated printers for specific jobs could optimise the output and reduce the total cost.

3. Font control

Controlling the font your employees use may seem like the activity of a fastidious control freak, however choosing a more ink-conservative font can save the office significant amounts in printing costs. Using more conservative font such as Century Gothic in lieu of the industry-standard but profligate Arial can lead to a huge saving in the long term.

Here is a guide to changing the default font on the most popular versions of Microsoft Word – making it easier to control the font of choice of your workforce.

4. Culture of cost-reduction

Imposing a culture of careful printing can reduce wasted and unnecessary prints. Stress the importance of checking and double-checking all text and images before sending to print throughout the workforce to reduce the instances of necessitated re-prints. Influence the team to utilise print preview tools, whether printing from word processing programmes or directly from web and email.

A dedicated copy editor could benefit a large office which relies heavily on a large volume of prints. Undertaking copy editing tasks, this dedicated team member could help reduce the risk of erroneous prints and necessary re-prints.

A printer with automatic duplex printing can halve the paper costs of an office immediately. This double-sided printing option significantly reduces paper usage without compromising professional standards. Citigroup Financial Services estimated they could save $700,000 USD per annum if their office staff all switched to duplex printing.

5. Cloud sharing

Cloud sharing tools such as Dropbox and OneDrive make it easier to store important files and documents and share them between colleagues, clients, customers and other branches – removing the necessity to print off all receipts, invoices and presentations. Going electronic with cloud sharing tools can help the office immediately cut their printed output and the subsequent printing costs.