Keeping printing costs under control. By Nigel Harris
A report entitled ‘Outsourced Printing – a Waste of Paper?’ from the leading economic research consultancy cebr 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 - ev
Continued...
The full article is available to registered AccountingWEB members only. To read the rest of this article you’ll need to login or register.
Registration is FREE and allows you to view all content, ask questions, comment and much more.
Or if you are already registered, login here
Printing out CT600
Nigel why are you not storing them digitally. A lot less cost on paper.
SEriously the comments about Education and paper are true and may even underestimate the wastage. My wife has just changed schools and the amount of paper put into the recycling was large.
Perhaps an e-footprint of each industry would help.
Ofcourse with the Civil Service less paper would mean less jobs (to sort and carry it..) !
The Benefits of Print Management
We should also consider ‘print management’ - the strategies companies put in place to deal cost-effectively and/or securely with in-house printing. Typically, firms will use the functionality to deliver a ‘print audit’, enabling them to gauge what each employee is printing, what individual printer has been used, what specific items have been processed and what are the overall costs.
The ultimate objective might be enhanced security or more efficient management of costs including the ability to accurately recharge external clients, or each internal business unit or department.
There are a broad range of potential benefits. Firms can configure their systems so that print jobs are automatically diverted to the least expensive or most appropriate printer available or alternatively that users are alerted to the fact that there is a better option on offer.
One of the most exciting potential developments is known as ‘follow me’ printing. This approach will allow individuals who find that their chosen printer is already busy to simply walk up to another printer and divert their job to that device by means of a swipe card or user code.
Other developments are being driven by the desire of many firms to save money by restricting access to expensive colour printing within their organisation. Companies are increasingly using print management technology either to prevent users from printing in colour altogether or to restrict the software packages which they can use for colour printing. This need is likely to be an increasingly important driver of new technology in the future.
For any accountancy firm, there are a range of benefits including the ability to control printing costs more effectively, to provide staff with the freedom to print where they wish or alternatively to restrict employees’ access to certain types of printing. If businesses are looking to recharge clients for printing, they may be able to recapture all of their print costs through efficient print management. Critically for accountancy firms, there are also security benefits
At the most basic level of print management, vendors can simply put a password on a particular job to ensure that only the person with relevant authorisation can print a specific document. This addresses security concerns that exist within many accountancy firms.
Evolving Market
The main market development currently in print management is that more utilities are being built into the hardware. Some printers now have a built-in encryption printing and secure printing capability. This immediately addresses the concerns of any company where security is an issue.
In the future, the further development of the print management market will primarily come down to how vendors react to customer needs. Technological development will be shaped predominantly by customer feedback and the market will continue to be driven, for the foreseeable future at least, by end user requirements.