[cz_image id=”cz_98467″ image=”12529″][/cz_image][cz_gap height=”25px”][cz_title id=”cz_18327″ cz_title=””]Have you noticed you’re replacing your copier’s color toner more often? Lately, does it seem like you’re refilling the paper trays all the time? Is someone in the office suddenly printing a lot more full-color documents for a new work assignment? Or is someone using the copier for printing lost cat posters, garage sale fliers or maybe dozens of full-color copies of their annual family calendar?

 

Most office policies allow occasional personal use of the office printer. A Keypoint Intelligence/InfoTrends study from 2016 shows this is a pretty common practice. According to the study, almost 80 percent of office workers occasionally run personal print jobs in the office, with more than a quarter of employees doing it at least once a week. Actually, personal use amounts to roughly 10 percent of all office print jobs.

 

That said, completely banning all personal use of office printers could lead to adverse effects. The study indicates these include more employees running late or leaving early to print at home, needing to leave mid-day to pick up a print job from a local copy center, increased feelings of guilt from sneaking in a print job here and there and increased anxiety, either because they broke an office policy or can’t produce a needed document in time as a result of the policy. Needless to say, no one needs more tardy and anxious workers.

 

For these reasons, most office managers view occasional personal printing as an employee perk, much like offering coffee in the break room. Sure, go ahead and enjoy a hot beverage every now and then, but don’t go taking armfuls of Swiss Miss packets home to feed your late-night chocolate cravings.

 

The same game goes for printing policies. There is a happy medium where some personal use of the office copy machine is fine. Banning it altogether has unintended consequences that can lower morale, but there are those times when things seem to be getting out of hand. For these times, when toner and paper costs seem to be skyrocketing for no work-related reason, you might wonder, “Is there a way to track who is printing what?”

 

The answer is, “Yes.” You’ll need to install a print management software solution on your office printers. We offer the leading solution called PaperCut. These types of print management solutions are designed to optimize the use of printers and multifunction printers (MFPs). It is a great office analytics tool that will help you determine if someone is taking advantage of lenient, worker-friendly printer policies and unintentionally driving up your office printing costs.

 

We can set up PaperCut and either a badge or password system when we first install your machine. These can also be added to equipment already in use. Regardless of how strict or lenient your printing policy may be, or the size of your business, PaperCut offers you a flexible solution to manage your office printing needs.

 

PaperCut has been installed on office printers since the 90s and claims to be in use by 50 million end-users in 180 countries, representing about 50,000 organizations. Over the years, they have saved trillions of pages of paper. That’s a lot of lost cat pictures and family calendars that didn’t get printed.

 

Saving paper represents more dollars in your pocket as well as something you could add to your marketing strategy. In fact, if being a “green” business and having a lower carbon footprint aligns with your company goals, PaperCut can even track and report savings by CO2 volume or by tree. Add this figure to your brochures or product packaging.

 

So how does PaperCut make your office more efficient? PaperCut allows you to track print jobs and users, and it lets you set restrictions on who can print on what machine, how much they can print, and even tailor what types of print jobs they can run. This is a great feature because what you need for permissions is probably completely unique to your business. For example, you might have your office copy machine where only your employees can access it. But your neighborhood church might use PaperCut on a machine they allow the public to access. To reduce costs and overuse, they might want to configure PaperCut to enable unlimited black and white prints — as a service to the public — yet restrict full-color print jobs only for authorized users.

 

Larger enterprises may have a variety of permissions set up on their machines. For example, there could be thousands of printers in a hospital, with hundreds on one floor alone. Some of those machines will be accessible to the public, yet they need to be restricted for only employee use. Other machines might be in exam rooms or in locations where only hospital staff can access them.

 

With PaperCut, an enterprise can have permissions allowing specific people to print to a machine, or it can be set up so that print jobs are permitted for anyone in your organization to print on any machine, enterprise-wide. So, you could send a print job to the system from your office in Salt Lake City, hop on a plane headed to your Las Vegas office, punch in your access code or scan your badge and have the print job released and run on the machine there. No need to take your presentation notes with you on the flight, where they could get lost along with your luggage.

 

PaperCut is a flexible solution that can ensure your office printing policies are being followed and your printing expenses are being tracked. You can make it as restricted as necessary or just use it to monitor printing activity and intervene only if you notice unusual behavior.

 

In other words, with PaperCut installed, you absolutely can determine who is printing what. Once you do, you can ask them to reign it in, just a little, to save some trees, to save you money and maybe save their job. And then you can ask them to leave some hot cocoa for the rest of us.[/cz_title][cz_gap height=”60px”]

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PRINT DOUBLE-SIDED

If you think about it, you can actually reduce your paper consumption by HALF if you make double-sided printing a regular practice in your office. Paper is expensive so that’s no small accomplishment. To cut printing costs, it’s as simple as selecting the double-sided option when you print. You can even make double-sided printing the default in your print driver settings.

 

PRINT IN BLACK & WHITE

And if you have a color machine, you can save big by changing your print default to black and white. You might be surprised to learn that, sometimes when the documents you’re printing appear to be black and white, the black on the page is actually made up of colors. This means that unless you make black & white your default, your color machine could be using yellow, magenta and cyan to make the black color that will appear on the page. Saving yourself the cost of color toner is always a smart idea.

 

Changing the default settings on your Sharp Copier is easy, here’s how (Windows):

Open the Control Panel and go to Devices & Printers (or Printers & Faxes) > right-click the Sharp Device you want to edit > Select Printing preferences > Select the 2-Sided (Book) radio button and check the Black and White Print box (if you have a color printer). Click Apply to store the settings. This will default your print jobs to print double-sided and in black & white to save on toner and paper![/cz_title][cz_gap height=”25px”]

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[cz_gap height=”25px”][cz_title id=”cz_65040″]While there are many ways to cut printing costs, these are a couple free and very easily-implemented solutions. If your business is interested in a more comprehensive approach to cutting print costs, PaperCut Print Control Software is a very effective solution to help cut printing costs and gain more control over the use of printing resources.[/cz_title]

[cz_image id=”cz_16966″ image=”12057″][/cz_image][cz_gap height=”25px”][cz_title id=”cz_60110″ cz_title=””]Did you know that it’s becoming more common for employees to print from the internet? If you’ve ever printed from a web browser, you know that it can be extremely wasteful – printing blank pages and pages with content you don’t need or want. By now it’s no surprise that wasteful printing means wasted money as the costs of toner, ink, and paper add up. Our goal is to help you use your printing equipment more efficiently so we’ve compiled some printing hacks that will help you save money, especially when printing from the web. For our purposes, we will give you instructions for each tip in Google Chrome, though there are ways to do many of these in most web browsers.

 

#1 – USE PRINT SELECTION

This could be the single most helpful tip for cutting costs associated with web printing. When you print using your web browser defaults, it will automatically print everything, including a whole lot of stuff you don’t want. Use the Print Selection option to only print what you need.

 

• Select the part you want to print by highlighting the text with your cursor.
• For Google Chrome: Click “Print” and make sure “Selection Only” is selected in the print dialogue. You may need to click the “More Settings” drop-down to access this option. When selected, you should only see the part you highlighted in the print preview.

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#2 – COPY & PASTE TEXT FROM BROWSER

Another great option is to copy and paste from your web browser into a word processor, like Microsoft Word. This gives you control to edit and delete unwanted content before printing. By using this method, we reduced the number of pages in our example from two to one and removed unnecessary colored text.

 

• Simply highlight the text and images you wish to copy, right click and select “Copy” or type Ctrl (or Command), C on your keyboard
• Open up your word processor
• Right click inside of your new document and select “Paste” or type Ctrl (or Command), V on your keyboard
• Review the content you pasted, delete any unwanted text or images
• Print directly from your Word document as you would normally

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#3 – PRINT MULTIPLE PAGES PER SHEET

You should be able to print 2 pages side-by-side on one sheet of paper and have the text still be plenty big enough to read. This is a very easy way to cut down on the total number of pages you print. This is called 2-Up printing. If you wanted to print 4 pages to a sheet, it would be called 4-Up printing…you get the idea.

 

• In Google Chrome: Click “Print” and click the “More Settings” drop down.  Click on “Print using system dialogue” at the bottom. This will allow you to choose your settings in your regular print driver. Click “Preferences” and select 2-Up Printing, then click okay.

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#4 – SELECT PAGE RANGE

When you print from the web, a lot of times the last 2-3 pages that print just have ads or footer information – things that you didn’t really need to print. Use the Page Range feature to specify and only print the pages with the content you need.

 

• In Google Chrome: Click “Print.” Click the drop-down menu beside the Pages section, and select “Custom.” Type in the page number or numbers you want to print, separated by commas. Click “Print.”

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