Accountancy has traditionally suffered from large print bills from outsourcing the production of audits, reports, business cards and marketing materials, according to OKI applications solutions manager Dave Willcox. The best way for firms to improve efficiency is to print materials in-house, he argues.
Printing up to 1,000 copies is normally cheaper to produce in-house. Short-run printing can help accountants tailor their messages to their intended audience to achieve a better response than impersonal mass mailings.
Accountants typically use relatively small amounts of colour such as red text for financial reports or client spreadsheets. In this context, judicious use of colour lets accountants emphasise information more effectively or highlight specific queries.
High-quality colour functionality can help accountancy firms to present themselves in visually attractive ways to differentiate themselves in the market and develop brand consistency. While colour capability is important, accountancy firms often also need a cost-effective mono capability for in-house communications. Colour-enabled mono devices give them all the functionality they need without requiring them to purchase expensive and unnecessary high-capacity colour toners. Separate toner drum units can help keep running costs to a minimum. Using double-sided printing can also save thousands of pounds every year in ink cartridges, paper and general wear and tear on the machine.
Croydon-based accountancy firm Somerton & Co put these ideas to the test when it recently upgraded its printer to an A3 C8800 colour printer from OKI . The printer comes with Template Manager software that helps the firm improve the quality of printed documents including letterhead and business cards.
Somerton & Co Accountant Chirag Vora comments, "We view the quality of our marketing material as a key element in successfully building our brand in the marketplace. When we first saw Template Manager, we were amazed at what it could offer us in enhancing that brand and enabling us to achieve consistency across all our accounting activities."
Because of the material they produce, accountants usually need flexibility in their print formats. Spreadsheets that run across several A4 sheets are often difficult to read. Printing them on A3 sheets not only reduces paper use, but makes the spreadsheets easier to read.
Vora explains, "As we were limited to A4, we often had to flick between several pages just to carry out a month’s analysis of a client’s accounts. It was an awkward and cumbersome process. Since implementing the printer, we can fit a whole spreadsheet onto one A3 page. This reduces paperwork and allows us to analyse a set of accounts far more quickly. It also makes it easier to run through issues with clients during face-to-face meetings."
The other advantage of the new device is its speed - up to 26 pages per minute (ppm) for colour output and 32ppm for monochrome, much faster than the firm's previous device.
Says Vora, "We often have to print several sets of accounts to tight deadlines and then send them to a range of different locations. Typically, these include Companies House, the client’s headquarters and the relevant tax offices. The rapid printing speed of our new printer makes this process much simpler."