A Print Audit is Essential for Every Professional Venture

A print strategy is just as important as marketing or hiring strategies. Without a print audit, it's impossible to get an overall picture of waste and expenditures for the company as a whole. There are many positive long and short-term effects. A few of which include saving money, increased security and efficiency, and decreased environmental impact. If you're skipping your print audit, you're probably leaving money on the table.

Since desktop printers have a low up-front cost, they look like a smart buy. But chances are those desktop printers are costing you money. Printers are an investment that you should be getting a return on. Running these slow, inefficient printers can cost you more than you think.

Some of the print environment is easily tracked and quantified, like the cost of toner, paper, ink, the printing devices themselves, and maintenance. Other, less apparent costs are often overlooked. These include physical storage space, production efficiency, technical support, and the maintenance of supplier relationships.

An expert print audit looks at all of these apparent and hidden costs to determine where your printing-related activities and hardware could be improved to save you up to 30%.

What Exactly is a Print Audit?

If you're not familiar, a print audit is just what it sounds like: an in-depth look at a company's printing environment in order to assess efficiency, security, and waste. Print audits are an essential part of gathering an overall picture of a company's expenditures.

A print audit can go so far as to tell you what devices are being used the most, the volume of printing across all your devices, and if your printing practices are generating a return on investment. Losing money from wasteful printing is often overlooked, but it's also easily remedied with a print audit. Of course, the sooner you take action with an audit, the sooner you can save your company money.

What are the Benefits of a Print Audit?

The benefits of a print audit are often surprising. Companies can see long-term print savings of up to 30%. Let's take a deeper look at the benefits now.

Saving Money

Of course, the bottom line is often at the top of your priorities. A print audit can save money not just in printer paper and ink, but also in electricity and time management.

Mapping all your devices and determining what each of them is used for the most can help efficiency. Not all printers are created equal, and some are better suited for specific jobs than others. Once you start fully utilizing your printers, you'll see the savings that come with increased efficiency.

Environmental Impact

An added benefit to saving money from a print audit is reducing your company's environmental impact. Optimized printer efficiency will allow you to use less paper, ink, and electricity. Not only is this good for your company, but it's also good for the world.

Reducing your environmental impact can also make for a good PR opportunity. These days people wish to work with socially responsible companies. Showing your success in reducing energy usage and waste can go a long way to getting new clients.

Printing Strategy

Once you know where your company needs to be for peak efficiency, you can closely monitor your printer usage. Having a system in place to deal with waste is extremely helpful in the long term, and it gives you a baseline to operate from.

Seemingly little things like ink color usage and default print page layout add up over time. Depending on your company's printing needs, changing something that seems trivial could drastically reduce costs.

A print audit will tell you exactly where you need to be and what you need to do to stay there.

Security

A print audit will also look at printer security, making sure none of your devices are vulnerable to a data breach. Also, sensitive information can end up in the wrong hands through printing errors. A print audit makes it possible to re-assess your security and make sure everything ends up where it's supposed to.

An easily implemented solution for better security is to authenticate every print job by user. You can do this by assigning a code or swipe card and it will cut back on wasteful printing as well as bring accountability and security to your printing environment.

Saving Time

How much time do your employees spend dealing with a faulty printer, or waiting for your IT people to show up and help them out? For most companies, this is an enormous time-waster.

A print audit will reduce this waste by ensuring that you have the right equipment and that it is functioning correctly. It can also determine an overall strategy for printer maintenance. This will help to make sure that the printers are routinely checked for issues, reducing employee troubleshooting times.

Solutions

Whether you've got ten or ten thousand employees, a print audit will likely save you money. It's hard to think about all the hidden expenditures that come along with a printing environment. Especially when you're concentrating on running your business. That's why a lot of companies take advantage of Managed Print Services.

Having one single company oversee and manage your print environment has many benefits. Imagine having one company taking care of all your printing needs and saving you money!

Managed print services have become popular because they save companies money on print devices, ink, paper, toner, storage space, electricity, and maintenance. Having a company manage your print services also saves money by reducing employee's time spent troubleshooting, maintaining supplier relationships, and dealing with inefficient devices.

If you're looking to get an overall view of your expenditures, need to cut some costs, or wish to increase productivity, a print audit is the way to go. From there it's an easy step to managed print services, or you can continue to manage and maintain your own print environment, working with your new money-saving strategy from your print audit!