Controlling print costs in schools is a constant battle. The general rule is: the easier you make printing, the more pages students will print, which is great, from a useability perspective, but terrible for the hip pocket. At least if left unchecked.
The situation you want to avoid is what we call the Unmonitored Print Environment, AKA The Money Pit. This is where students and staff can print from anywhere, with no controls, limits, or oversight, and the only metric for how much you’re printing is the bill you’re stuck with at the end of each semester.
Businesses spend between 1% and 3% of their annual revenue on printing—about $750 per employee annually. While schools may not hit those levels, any unnecessary spending on printing for schools is worth addressing. Print management software can help schools print smarter, faster, and—most importantly—more cost-effectively.
What is print management software?
Print management simply refers to the tools, processes, and strategies we use to control print activity. At its most basic level, print management software lets you track who’s printing, how much they’re printing, and how efficient your print environment really is.
It lets you control stuff like print quotas (i.e. set limits on how much a user can print), default print settings, driver deployment across campuses, print job routing, authentication, and security.
CRUNCH THE NUMBERS WITH OUR PRINT ROI CALCULATOREnforcing print policies and reducing waste
Wasted pages equal wasted money. Schools only want printing to occur when absolutely necessary, and even then, efficiency is key.
With print management software, you can enforce rules like duplex printing (double-sided) or black-and-white printing as standard for documents. For occasional color printing, administrators can charge additionally or restrict access to specific users or groups. Something as simple as automatic duplex printing literally halves your paper use overnight (think about it).
Anecdotally, many of PaperCut’s educational partners have managed to reduce their printing costs by up to 70% through a combination of quotas and print charging .
Tracking and limiting user printing
The real value-add of print management software, the secret sauce, is that it gives your IT department granular, centralized control over your entire print environment, with real-time information on how everyone is printing.
You can monitor print usage by department, user, printer, or group and assign print quotas to limit excessive printing. By quickly identifying high-volume users or departments, you can tailor your print management strategy to maximize your spend (and cut down on waste).
One K-12 school saved thousands on paper costs by implementing quotas and monitoring tools. Their IT Manager said: “We showed them the raw cost of printing each time they printed. People realized it was coming off their virtual allowance, so they began adopting a real ‘think before you print’ mentality”.
“Back in 2018, we started the “War on Paper” at the school. We had a teacher in particular who consumed over 120,000 sheets in a semester which set off our alarms. The top 5 printing users consumed about 30% of the institution’s printing. After implementing quotas, these teachers were cut off from all printing within the first month of school. Since then, the teachers have been under control and have changed their habits to stretch our [generous] quota over the course of the semester. It is possible!!”
Optimizing printer fleet usage
Print management software for schools allows you to automatically redirect jobs to the most cost-efficient devices – an absolute game-changer for sysadmins.
For example, you may want to route large print jobs to high-capacity printers rather than desktop units. This reduces reliance on personal printers by shifting everyone onto one central print queue.
With Find-Me Printing , students and staff can securely release print jobs at the MFD that makes the most sense – either the closest or the most secure.
Don’t forget about energy efficiency, either. Upgrading your legacy fleet to new, energy-efficient MFDs is an upfront cost, but these machines can save you 30% on your printer energy bill , which adds up over time, so worth considering how you can gradually optimize your fleet.
Minimize uncollected print jobs
One of the hidden features of print management is
secure print release
, which means users must authenticate themselves at the MFD to release the print job.
This has a couple of benefits. First, it’s much more secure: only authorized users can physically print documents on the network. Second, it saves money! Pull printing, as it’s known, reduces waste from forgotten or abandoned print jobs, especially in shared print environments like K-12 schools.
Short version: students only end up printing what they actually need.
The stats back this up. 15% of print jobs in the hold/release queue are never actually printed. That’s a 15% ROI on paper, ink, and toner consumption right off the bat!
Cost insights and reporting
Before you can reduce spending, you first need to figure out how much you’re spending. And that means print tracking, reporting, and audits. With print management software for schools, you can generate reports to analyze printing costs across different departments and quickly identify areas for improvement.
It’s a smarter way to print. It also means you can eliminate redundant printers that no one’s using, cutting down on maintenance and streamlining your printer fleet. Always a good thing.
Authentication and security
Schools (quite rightly) put a lot of emphasis on print security. With so many users, permission levels, departments and documents flying all over the place, it’s all too easy for confidential information to end up in the wrong hands (or the wrong print tray). This is where user authentication can help.
Which authentication method you choose will depend on a few factors, but Single Sign-On (SSO) is generally the simplest, and most popular. With SSO, users log in once using their institutional credentials (Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra ID, etc.) and the system authenticates them for printing too. Easy peasy.
Of course, if you want an added layer of security, we always recommend Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), which ** ** requires two or more verification steps, such as a password plus a mobile app or biometric authentication. MFA is basically the gold standard of print security. It reduces the risk of data breaches, and you can combine it with school-issued ID cards or badges (RFID, NFC, or smart card) which interface directly with the printer.
Case Study: Minehead Middle School
With hardware incompatibilities and students and staff enjoying no restrictions on their printing, IT Manager Tony Ayre sought a replacement print management solution. PaperCut MF was chosen due to its comprehensive feature set, which allows Tony to control print volume, restrict printing access, and empower users to manage quotas with minimal IT involvement.
As a result, student printing decreased by 90%, drastically reducing costs. Tony’s favorite part? The simple satisfaction of a set-and-forget solution: “We can safely leave it to do its job, and not worry about running up massive printing bills.”
