Printing for business 101

As a business, large, medium or small, you will have a range of printing needs, from your in-house printing of documents, letters or invoices, to the printing of your leaflets, business cards or brochures by a professional printing company. No matter the final outcome, you’ll want to think about the cost to not only yourself but the environment too.

How can you save costs in-house?

Limit your colour printing

It sounds obvious but most printers will automatically print in colour unless the settings are changed and the default becomes black and white. This can be costly as an A4 piece of paper with only 5% of coloured ink costs more than 4 times the amount of black and white printing. Staff printing emails with coloured signatures or pages from the web are the major culprits so encouraging them to print in black and white is your second step after changing those default settings.

Don’t overstock your cupboards with toner

Most offices follow the ‘just in case’ rule stocking their cupboards with coloured toner, but a lot of modern printers now warn you they’re going to run out, giving you enough time to order new toner on a next day or 48 hour delivery – depending on how many people are in your office printing. Also, if you do manage to encourage more black and white printing, you will find you are less reliant on coloured toner and don’t need to order in as much so be careful to not end up with mountains of coloured toner because you’re worried about ‘running out’.

Go digital

It can be difficult to adapt and change your ways but printing less by ‘going digital’ can really help to reduce your in-house printing costs. Everything is online nowadays and with the ability to share online documents through services such as Google docs, there is even less of a need to print. Once you’ve cracked it, it’ll be time to encourage your staff to follow in your footsteps but don’t expect them to be able to ‘go digital’ if you haven’t done it yourself first.

It’s not just about in-house printing…

Find a reliable supplier and stick with them

Finding the best professional printer can be tough but once you have found one you can rely on, it’s worth getting all of your printing processed with them as they will be able to offer you cost savings and discounts by ‘batch’ printing.

Don’t get ‘mugged off’, shop around!

Using one supplier to print everything for you does save costs but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t shop around a look for the best prices. Challenge your supplier by showing them cheaper costs from other printers, if you can find some, and see if they’ll match them. It’s easier for suppliers to match costs and keep customers than find new ones.

Only print what you really need

A lot of the time you end up printing more leaflets, brochures or even business cards than you actually need. Planning a mail out? Spend the time cleaning up your data so you don’t end up sending something out, only to get it sent back to your office. Attending an event? Find out how many attendees are going and who is going. You may find you only need half as many leaflets, brochures or business cards as you first thought.

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