By PowerBuy // 24 July 2012 // Related Categories: Tips

The word "bleed" is used by professional printers and graphic designers when discussing how close an image gets to the edge of the paper. But it can also be used when describing the cost of printing. There's research that suggests businesses up to 3% of their revenue on printing?

Think about it - up to two weeks of your company's revenue just goes to printing. So, what can you do to decrease the bleeding of many through your printers?

1. Print less

It's probably impossible to go totally paperless but a decent projector and some tablet computers can make meetings paperless without too much trouble. There's plenty of software that lets you edit or annotate documents on a tablet. The biggest issue is getting people to change their habits and get used to reading from a screen.

2. Mono is cheap

Colour printing can cost up to 10 times as much as monochrome. If you don't need colour - don't use it. If the page you're printing is black and white but you don't change the printer's settings to black and white, the printer may use coloured ink or toner to produce black which is very inefficient and expensive.

3. Double-sided to cut the paper bill

Not every document can be double-sided - single page documents come to mind - but it's possible to reduce your paper bill significantly by duplexing. For bonus points print multiple pages per sheet so a single piece of paper can hold four pages.

4. You can't fix what you don't measure

If you want to quantify your real costs and savings you need to accurately measure what's going on. Consider printer management software like PaperCut, Print Audit or PrintSolv. This will let you see who prints, what print jobs cost the most and allow you target where you can make the most savings. Your IT expert can also help you better understand your print costs and recommend solutions to minimise the Print Bleed.


Comments: 2 // Share:

Ken // 03/10/2012 9:01 PM

Some good points raised here. We were actually able to cut our printing costs by about 70% just by getting a second, mono, printer. Everyone's default printer was then shifted to the mono. If you wanted to print in colour, you still could, but you had to manually switch printers. Most people just made do with mono.

Michael // 01/10/2013 8:15 PM

Interesting points. Fast growing market of printing software offers more and more developed systems like Cloud-Managed Printing. Papercut, Cortado or ezeep ( ) are easy-to-use solutions which save time and reduce costs of printing.

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