Is Your Printer Wasting More Money Than it’s Worth?

Is your printer printing dollars, or eating them? Today’s blog is dedicated toward helping your business save as much money as possible on printing costs so that you can achieve the best return on your printing investment.

It all starts by calculating just how much each individual page costs your organization.

Why Cost-Per-Page is So Important
A printer has plenty of operating costs associated with it, including the costs of both ink and paper. Ink is distributed in ink cartridges, and these need to be replaced from time to time. These cartridges are certainly not cheap, either. Depending on the type of printer you use and the types of documents you are printing, you may require even more ink than normal.

The cost-per-page, or CPP, is important to keep in mind so that you know just how much you are spending every day. If there is a heavy loss per page, you’ll wind up spending more on your printing solutions than you’re getting back for them.

How to Calculate Your Average Cost-Per-Page
The calculation for CPP is pretty simple, all things considered. All you do is divide the price of the cartridge by the cartridge yield rating--approximately how many pages the cartridge can print. You’ll find this number on the cartridge’s packaging. Let’s say that you spend $25 on a cartridge of black ink with a yield of 525 pages. You can plug this into the calculation like this:

25/525 = 0.048

This cost in this case is about 5 cents per page.

Calculating CPP in More Complicated Printers
Ink cartridges can add extra steps into this calculation, especially if they are of different colors and configurations. Each individual cartridge has a different color (black, cyan, yellow, and magenta) or two cartridges that cover them all (black and cyan, yellow, magenta). Either way, the calculation will come out mostly the same, with only a few minor adjustments to how the colors are collected together.

When you are adding colors into the calculation, you’ll need to use the CPP of each individual color and add it to your total. It’s worth mentioning that printing in color is going to cost more than if you were just printing with black ink.

Plus, keep in mind that ink manufacturers will often base their yield rating on the standardized documents used by businesses. These calculations include the fact that documents will be covered in ink to a certain degree. Thus, printing documents that don’t adhere to these definitions can throw off how many pages you actually get from the cartridge. In other words, it’s an average. We’ve found that it doesn’t hurt to round up, because ink manufacturers want the numbers to work in their favor.

Controlling Your Printing
If you can calculate how much you actually stand to benefit from your printing, you can set standards that allow you to control how much printed material is actually circulated around your office. Computerware can be key to this endeavor. We can assist you with the implementation of technologies designed to help you save money on your printing solutions. This can include setting up quotas and reports, so you can see if certain individuals need to cut back on printing materials, and a way to ensure that they do.

To learn more, reach out to us at (703) 821-8200.