How much does your business invest in printing costs each year?
What is your cost of printing?
If you find yourself or your coworkers printing frequently, you might be interested to know how much printing is costing your business.
A study by Gartner found that companies invest between 1-3% of annual income on printing. Let’s have a look a how you can work our your businesses cost of printing.
Your expense of printing can be broken down into 2 primary sub-categories concentrating on printing expenses and the other being process costs.
Printing Expenses
Printing expenses are any expenses sustained through your printer. This consists of the cost of your printers, the cost of your printer consumables like ink, and the cost of printing paper.
Printers
The actual purchase cost of a printer represents about 5% of the overall lifetime expense of the printer.
This is because the extra costs of ink, paper, upkeep and energy all add up gradually, basically making each piece of paper you print, costlier than the previous one.
If you invest €500 on a printer, which can differ from 3 to 5 years, it will cost you €10,000 over it’s lifetime.
Printer consumables
Printer consumables like ink cartridges, toner, printer paper, and energy all accumulate towards your overall printing costs.
The cost you pay for ink and toner will differ depending upon the type of printer you utilize, however in general, a replacement ink or toner cartridge can cost anywhere in between €20- €100. Of course, the more frequently you print, the more ink, energy, toner and paper you will consume.
Paper
It is approximated that the average staff member prints out 10,000 sheets of paper annually and the typical expense for paper is anywhere from half a cent or less per page to two cents, while exceptional paper can cost as much as 10 cents per page.
If they print with premium paper, this indicates that on the average a single worker uses €1000 per year of paper.
Interested in finding out more about managing print expenses? Have a look at this totally free whitepaper on factors to consider for reducing your printing costs!
Squandered files
A research study conducted by Lexmark discovered that approximately 17% of printed pages were thought about waste.
This indicates that 1700 printed out pages for a single employee are considered waste every year!
Knowing that each paper costs anywhere from half a cent or less per page to 2 cents for routine paper, this means that a single user wastes about €34 annually.
Process Costs
Process expenses are more so the unseen expenses that occur through squandered user performance and IT maintenance.
Downtime
How much productivity time do you think an individual loses waiting on their print environment to be fixed?
Of course, the outage will impact each company differently, so it is crucial to take a closer look at determining downtime.
Downtime cost = (variety of workers) x (typical employee cost) x (period of wait time).
So, for a company with 100 workers at a typical cost of €20/hour, with a wait time of 2 hours, the downtime expense would be €4,000.
Upkeep
At the same time of downtime productivity costs, there are also direct labour expenses of having to maintain your print environment.
Direct labor cost = (variety of system admins) x (typical system admin expense) x (period of maintenance time).
So, for a business who has 1 system admin that invests 5 hours per week preserving your printing environment at €40/hour, will have a direct labour maintenance cost of €200 weekly.
If you increase that by 52 weeks, you will get an overall direct labour expense of €10,400 annually.
How does your IT print costs measure up?
Not all elements of annual IT print expenses have been covered in this short article as there are several aspects that enter into Overall Expense of Ownership depending upon your market and business.
One thing to remember is that once you do have a basic concept of your yearly IT expenses and your overall ownership cost, the next action is figuring out how to minimize those costs.
