Budgets are a lot like buckets. They have a finite capacity, they get refilled based on use, and a few holes in the bottom can make the whole thing kind of pointless. Here ends the heavy-handed budget/bucket analogy, but we still think we’ve made our point.
Print budgets are precious, and every dollar counts. The problem is that waste isn’t always obvious and yet can quickly drain your budget. A handful of underused printers, unnecessary color printing, abandoned jobs or inefficient fleet decisions can quietly add up. The trick is knowing where to look.
Here are the steps to take to reduce print costs:
- Look for underused printers that still cost money to maintain.
- Look for unnecessary color printing, either by an individual or a department.
- Analyze your print fleet for double-ups and under-utilization.
- Automatically stop print jobs from printing until the person is there to collect it.
- Report on print patterns and usage, so that any anomalies get flagged early.
1. Printers nobody really uses anymore
Could underused printers be quietly draining your budget?
Short answer: you betcha. A printer that produces very few pages might seem harmless, but every device in your fleet represents an ongoing cost, including maintenance, support, energy ,and (eventually) replacement.
We see it all the time: a small number of printers do the bulk of the office work, while others sit idle. That can indicate an opportunity to consolidate devices, relocate them, or rethink which printers are actually needed.
Start by looking at utilization data for individual printers. How many pages does each device produce? How often is it used? Are there devices that consistently have very low output? Ask your staff: they’ll tell you exactly what’s going on.
A utilization report can help turn these questions into evidence, so instead of automatically replacing every device when it reaches end of life, you can use actual demand to decide whether you need another printer at all. (Hint: you often don’t.)
2. Color printing that isn’t adding value
How much of your color printing is actually necessary?
Color printing isn’t inherently bad. The issue is paying for color when it doesn’t actually need to be used. Plain text? Nope. A spreadsheet of numbers? Unlikely. Employee data? The full spectrum of the rainbow is likely not required.
A report showing color usage by user, department, device or application can help identify where these toner costs are accumulating. You might discover that a particular team is responsible for a hugely disproportionate amount of color printing, or that certain documents are routinely printed in color when black and white would work just fine.
The next step is to investigate, rather than simply impose restrictions. Review printer defaults, user preferences and print policies based on what the data shows. Then crack the whip accordingly (figuratively speaking – HR frowns on actual whips).
3. A fleet that’s grown without a plan
Does your printer fleet still match the way your people actually work?
Printer fleets have this bad habit of growing organically. A new office opens. Teams move floors. Someone requests a printer for a specific project. A few years later, your organization has a hodgepodge collection of 72 different devices, with warranty cards that have been lost in the mists of time.
Hybrid work can make this mismatch even worse. If fewer people are in the office every day, some devices may now be significantly underused.
This is where good data comes in. Print data can help inform fleet refreshes and procurement decisions. Look at stuff like print volumes, utilization, locations and trends before deciding what to replace, consolidate, or ditch altogether.
The goal is to have a fleet that reflects your actual demand, and how users print every single day, not necessarily fewer printers. Although that’s often the eventual end point.
4. Jobs that never get collected
What happens to the documents nobody ever picks up? AKA, ahh, look at all the lonely paper…
Putting aside the blatant security risk, a print job that sits in a paper tray and never gets picked up still costs you money.
Unclaimed jobs are particularly common in shared office environments. Someone sends a document to a printer, gets distracted by free food in the breakroom, changes their mind, or simply forgets about it. Multiply that behavior across hundreds or thousands of employees and the waste can become significant.
Reporting can help you understand how often this happens – and where. Secure print release can then address the underlying behavior by holding jobs until the user authenticates at the device. We rarely spruik technology as a silver bullet, but secure print release basically renders unclaimed print jobs moot.
5. Printing patterns you didn’t know existed
What hidden trends could your print data reveal?
One of the most valuable (and surprising) things about print reporting is that it can reveal patterns you weren’t even looking for.
A sudden increase in printing could point to a new business process, a particular project or an unexpected change in user behavior. A department that has steadily increased its print volume might warrant further investigation (seriously, culture team, what are you guys printing over there?) On the flip side, a location that’s barely using its printers could indicate that workplace patterns have changed, or there’s a technical issue that nobody’s bothered to flag.
The important thing is to look for trends, rather than treating reports as static snapshots.
Regular reporting establishes a useful baseline, making unusual spikes, drops and changes easier to identify. Those insights can then inform conversations about procurement, workflow changes, printer placement, and usage, before small inefficiencies become huge, unwieldy, awkward-questions-from-upper-management inefficiencies.
The bottom line
Reducing print costs isn’t about cutting printing across the board. In fact, that’s usually a bad policy. It’s more about understanding where your budget is quietly disappearing so you can plug the holes in the proverbial bucket.
Print reporting is your first line of defense. It gives IT teams a clearer picture of what’s actually happening across the print environment: which devices are being used, where color is burning a metaphorical hole in your spreadsheets, which jobs are abandoned and how printing behaviour is changing.
With that information, cost reduction becomes less about guesswork and more about making targeted decisions based on usage. In our experience, the biggest savings aren’t found by asking people to print less. They’re found by understanding what, where, when and why they’re already printing.
