How to reduce office printing costs without annoying staff

Know what you're actually spending

Printing costs are spread across many places: leases, service contracts, toner orders, paper, the odd emergency cartridge from the supermarket and the time staff spend clearing jams. Pull together a year of invoices and meter readings to find the real total and the cost per page for black and white and colour. Many offices are surprised by the colour figure.

Most office devices can report page counts by user or department when print management is set up. Even a simple monthly meter reading per device gives you a baseline. Without numbers, cost reduction becomes a debate about opinions; with them, you can target the few habits that drive most of the spend.

Change the defaults

Set every printer to print double-sided and in black and white by default. People can still choose colour or single-sided when they genuinely need it, but most won't bother changing the setting for internal documents. This single change often has the biggest effect, and it costs nothing but a few minutes in the printer settings or your device management policies.

Consider limiting colour to certain users or groups, such as marketing or management, and making everyone else request it. Draft or toner-saving modes are useful for internal printing. Remove old printers from users' computers so jobs don't go to a slow, expensive desktop inkjet nobody remembers owning.

Paper settings matter as well. Make sure the device knows which tray holds letterhead and which holds plain paper, so nobody wastes expensive stock on internal drafts. Turn off banner or separator pages if they were enabled years ago, and check that jobs sent from Macs and phones also pick up the black and white and double-sided defaults, since they sometimes bypass the Windows driver settings.

Secure print release

With secure print release, jobs are held in a queue until the person signs in at the device with a card, PIN or phone. If they never collect it, the job expires and is never printed. That eliminates the stack of forgotten printouts that ends up in the recycling bin each week, and it stops confidential documents sitting in the tray for anyone to read.

Release also lets staff print to any device in the office and collect from whichever is closest or free. Many modern multifunction devices support it built in, and cloud print management services can add it without an on-premises print server. For offices handling personal information, the privacy benefit alone justifies it.

Consolidate devices and consumables

Small desktop printers scattered around the office are often the most expensive way to print, with high cartridge costs and no service contract. Replacing several of them with one or two shared multifunction devices usually lowers cost per page considerably and reduces the variety of consumables you need to stock.

Buy genuine or quality-assured consumables through a business supplier and keep a sensible stock, rather than paying retail prices in an emergency. If your device is on a service contract, check whether toner is already included before buying it separately. Avoid stockpiling large quantities of consumables for a device near the end of its life.

Review the service contract

Office copier leases often bundle a minimum monthly charge, a cost per page for black and white and colour, and service. Check whether you consistently print well below the minimum, which means you're paying for pages you don't use, or well above it at a higher rate. Both are reasons to renegotiate or change device when the lease is up.

Watch for automatic renewals and annual price increases built into the contract. Put the lease end date in your calendar several months ahead, so you have time to measure your usage, get competitive quotes and decide whether you need the same size device again.

Print less

The cheapest page is the one never printed. Moving processes such as timesheets, leave forms, purchase approvals and invoice processing to digital workflows reduces printing permanently. Microsoft Forms, Approvals in Teams, digital signatures and accounting software that captures invoices from email can each remove a regular print habit.

Larger or additional monitors also reduce printing, because people often print documents just to compare them side by side. Make it easy to read and mark up documents on screen and the urge to print fades. Track the numbers over a few months to confirm the changes are working, and share the results with the team.

Set a realistic target, such as reducing pages by a fifth over six months, and report progress in a team meeting. People respond well to seeing that a change made a difference. Recognise teams that have moved processes online, and ask the heaviest printers what they're printing and why. Often there is a single report or form behind most of it that can be fixed once.