5 Simple Ways

to Reduce Your Printing Costs

5 Simple Ways to Reduce Your Printing Costs...

without having to print less, change your existing printers or your existing consumable supplier!

By Ricky Bond Ricky is one of the UK’s leading experts in alternative printer and printer cartridge technologies. To date Ricky has helped thousands of organisations throughout the UK reduce the environmental impact of their printing. Ricky has saved over 500,000 printer cartridges being sent to landfill so far while saving millions of pounds for his clients in the process. Ricky is the straight talking printing expert you should be calling upon to help you relieve your schools printing headaches. Get in touch: [email protected]

Ricky Bond Tel: 020 8232 9830 [email protected] www.ecoprinters.net

5 Simple Ways to Reduce Printing Costs... without having to print less, change your existing printers or your existing consumable supplier! Since 2004 the cost of printer cartridges has increased 33% quicker than inflation. It’s no wonder then that most schools who get in touch with me do so because no matter what money saving initiatives they try it has very little impact on the bottom-line as the raw cost is increasing so fast. What most people don’t know is that there are many simple things you can do that will reduce printer consumable usage instantly, making your printing much more affordable.

This report focuses on my top five tips, quick wins you can implement or train in minutes that will reduce your current spend without having to change your printer hardware or even your existing consumable supplier. Read on to find out my top five cost saving printing tips!

Tip #1

USE ECOFONTS ECOFONTS are a great way to help you reduce your spend if you print mainly text.

So, what is an ECOFONT? ECOFONT is like the popular ARIAL font, but, it has little holes punched in the letters that aren’t really visible to the naked eye. A close up example of an ECOFONT can be seen below;

Using an ECOFONT will save money as no ink is required to print the holes in the text, an amazingly simple but effective idea that could save you up to 50%. ECOFONT is available to download for Windows, Mac and Linux, you can find more information at www.ecofont.com

Tip #2

CHANGE YOUR FONT TYPE Consider the following scenario, you need to distribute a document to parents. You decide to produce a newsletter, it is four sides long and you have to produce a printed version for every child in your school. This document needs to be crisp and clean so you are unable to use ECOFONTS which sacrifices slightly on readability. Can you produce high quality print whilst keeping an eye on the budget? The answer is YES. Changing the font you use will affect how much ink you use. For example, in primary schools the most common font used is Comic Sans MS which uses 46% more ink than the font I am typing in now Calibri. Garamond, the font I am typing in now is the most cost effective font we have tested. This font is unlikely to be alien to your pupils eyes... most of the Harry Potter books, which have sold over 450 million copies worldwide were printed in Garamond font size 12.

Tip #3

CHANGE YOUR FONT SIZE Sometimes a complex problem has a simple solution.

Although this is pretty obvious whenever I mention it to the schools purse-string holders as a solution to saving money it always amazes me how many people have not already considered this! Changing your font size from 12 to 11 will save a considerable amount of money as the characters are much smaller to print. You will also notice that you are able to fit more words on each page, saving on paper costs too! When you combine this with tip #2 you will notice a considerable cost saving and will be able to make your budget stretch much further.

Tip #4

USE SNIPPING TOOL OR GRAB Sometimes you need to print from a website or PDF document like this one and only need a small section of what you see on the screen, however, when you press print it prints everything wasting valuable ink. Printing unnecessary adverts, images and text is very expensive. A great solution is to use the snipping tool in Windows 7 upwards or Grab if you use a Mac. The snipping tool or Grab provides a simple interface to capture and save screen shots allowing you to select the portion of the screen you want to print. The software is very simple to use, you simply drag your mouse to draw a box around the area you want to capture. You can then save or print it saving a ton of ink and paper in the process. These tools are great fun and easy to use. They also make staff and pupils think more carefully about what they print which is great practice for cost saving in the long run. You can find out more at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows7/products/features/snipping-tool https://support.apple.com/kb/PH6846?locale=en_US

Tip #5

BAN PRINTING ONE DAY A WEEK No, seriously: Every Friday for instance, turn off all the printers, lock them away if you have to! The complaints at first will be fierce and furious and you will hear considerable begging that “I must print this email” or “I really need to print my boarding pass right now” However, it won’t take more than a few weeks for people to figure out how to survive without their printer one day a week, at this point you could go even further... two days a week? three??? You will know when you have reached breaking point but if you and your colleagues reach the point where your printer is turned off more than it is printing you may be able to ditch it altogether! Ok, maybe not... but you will learn to plan your printing in advance which should see spontaneous printing kept to a minimum, saving on printing costs until the myth of “the paperless office” becomes a welcome reality.

So that’s it! Your five cost saving tips are now locked into your consciousness for you to go away and master... To go away and persuade everyone else to get on the “same page” so to speak. So now I am providing you with a very special mission. Go and implement just one of these tips STRAIGHT AWAY. Don’t procrastinate, don’t sit around waiting for someone else to step in to save your school money. Even if it is simply changing the default font on word or asking the staff to make the font they print in one size smaller, choose just one and do it right now. Speak to the relevant people and get it “actioned” Good luck, I would love to hear about any success you have implementing these or any other cost saving initiatives you have already implemented that I can share with the many schools I visit who are locked into contracts and are struggling to control their printing costs.

WHAT NEXT? If you have any questions or are interested in finding out about alternative printer technologies that could save your school money and put you in total control of your schools printer consumable budget, get in touch with Ricky. He’ll be more than happy to help

Call 020 8232 9830 or email [email protected] Ricky looks forward to hearing from you and helping you free up your valuable IT budget to spend on more fun and much needed things than printer toners.