Printing comes with a lot of costs. If you don't know exactly how all those costs add up, your print budget could be in a lot of trouble--but it's not always easy to find out where your money is going. Today, with a little help from managed print services, we'll find out one important number--your per-page print cost.
Identifying Costs with Managed Print Services
Managed print services can help you do a lot of things, but one of its most important tasks is giving you the information you need to improve budget insight. With managed print, you'll have better visibility into every little cost, which means you can take control of your print environment one dollar at a time.
One good example is the per-page print cost. This is a number expressing how much it costs to print or copy a single page. Once you know this cost, you can learn more about what's really going on in your print environment.
Here's how to get started:
- #1: Identify page yield.
Page yield is the number of pages that one toner or ink cartridge can create. It's generally based on prints with 5% coverage or 15-18 lines of text per page.
- #2: Find the cartridge cost.
How much do you pay for a single ink cartridge? You'll need this number to find the per-page print cost.
- #3: Do a little math.
Now that you have both numbers, it's time to do some division. Here's the formula:
Toner cost / Toner yield
Let's say you pay $45 per cartridge, and each one has a yield of 500. That's 45/500, or $0.09 per page. That might not seem like a lot, but multiply it by all the pages you print in a week or even just one day, and suddenly you start to realize where your print budget is going!
- #4: Make improvements.
Now that you know your per-page print cost, it's time for a little help from managed print services. Managed print can help you identify these costs and cut them down to size, giving you simple, actionable ways to save money without interrupting your print environment.
Conclusion
So, what's your per-page print cost? Did the number surprise you? If so, that's a sign that you need to do more investigating to uncover the other hidden costs of printing--and managed print can help.
Contact us today to get started with managed print services!
