February 26, 2019. My article “5 Problems That an Office Print Analysis Can Identify” went live on IT Channel News — and it touched a nerve.
Here’s a question most companies never think to ask: do you actually know how much you spend on printing? Not roughly. Exactly. The honest answer, for the vast majority of businesses, is no.
Office printing looks deceptively simple from the outside. You buy a printer, load some paper, done. In reality, it’s a quiet budget leak — one that a proper audit by a specialized company can cut by up to 30% without reducing a single page of output.
So what does a real print audit actually look at? Every device in the office, its load and utilization, whether printers are sitting idle (and still consuming electricity), whether color print rules are being followed, and which departments are printing the most and why.
And what does it find? Almost always, the same five problems:
Unsecured printing — documents with confidential data sitting on a printer tray, waiting to be picked up by whoever walks past first. A data leak hiding in plain sight.
Unauthorized use — one person prints their passport copy, fine. But without any controls, that quickly turns into printing for the whole family. And if someone sends a black-and-white document to a color printer by mistake, every single page costs significantly more.
Too many devices, too little use — a printer nobody walks to is a printer nobody uses. But it still draws power in sleep mode, every single day.
Time wasted on consumables — a “zoo” of devices from multiple vendors means multiple paper types, multiple toner cartridges, multiple service contracts. IT staff get pulled into print issues instead of doing their actual jobs.
Wrong operating conditions — printers placed against walls, in unventilated corners, fed with cheap paper that sheds dust inside the mechanism. Small oversights that lead to real breakdowns.
None of these are dramatic. But they add up — month after month, invisibly — until someone finally runs the numbers.