A report entitled ‘Outsourced Printing – a Waste of Paper?’ from the leading economic research consultancy and OKI Printing Solutions suggests that huge savings could be made by implementing simple changes to everyday printing tasks in tax consultancies and accounting firms.

The report estimates that the accountancy profession wastes £11 million a year in unnecessary external print costs, which it rather unimaginatively suggests could be spent providing every accountant in the UK with a top of the range £40 calculator - every year! I am sure most accountants could find something better to spend the money on, but the point is well made.

The savings are even more impressive in other sectors. The estimated £115 million wasted in the education sector could be used to fill every teaching vacancy two and a half times over with new graduate teachers. In the civil service the £110 million savings could be used to cover the Council Tax on 82,808 band D homes or to buy 2.1 million combat helmets (assuming there are 2.1m service personnel to wear them).

Cebr’s argument is that users could save significant sums by using technology to replace expensive outsourced printing with in-house printing, and by more efficient management of existing in-house printing tasks. The report reckons that 20% of bought-in print is never used and simply thrown away.

The latest colour printing technology allows users not only to print professional-looking letter heads, business documents and marketing materials as and when they are required, but easily and effectively to design them in-house too.

Where in-house printing is already used, there are still significant savings to be made by ensuring that your printers are correctly set up to minimise time and paper wastage, using ‘mono’ when documents don’t need to be in colour, and using ‘duplex’ for printing on both sides could save an average-sized firm thousands of pounds a year in ink, toners, paper and their time, whilst delivering a better service. Tax departments, for example, are obvious targets for print savings - there is no good reason for printing self assessment returns in full colour!

These savings don't require a big outlay. A simple cost saving utility I use daily is , a cheap printer utility which allows you to print several pages on one sheet of A4. I use it to print file copies of things like 4-page CT600 returns on a singe page. They are perfectly legible, save ink and paper and don't fill up the file.

Coincidentally, on AccountingWEB our own research has come up with some similar conclusions! Simon Hurst’s recent dealt with selecting a new colour laser printer and revealed that a more expensive machine can work out cheaper in the long run when consumables are factored in. Simon calculated that the more expensive £520 printer actually worked out £130 cheaper to buy and run than the £250 model!

The community leaped to Simon’s support, a number or readers commenting that it is often cheaper to buy a new printer than to replace expensive toner and drum units when a printer needs servicing. There was no consensus on good and bad brands – Oki, Samsung, HP, Kyocera and Canon all had their supporters. No surprisingly, HP as the most common brand of printer also took a few knocks.

An interesting suggestion came from Trevor Scott and Paul Johnstone – they recommend buying a second-hand colour printer and cheap consumables on eBay! Older HP printers, reputed to be more reliable than the newer models, can be picked up on eBay very cheaply and still have years of useful service left in them after being cast off by firms more interested in having the latest models.

So it looks like some in the accounting profession are not content with just a new calculator each year, they are hunting out some serious cash savings by actively managing their printers. Cebr reckons potential print savings could boost UK GDP by £1 billion. It’s good to see the accountancy profession making its contribution.

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