Saving Money On Printing Costs
Saving Money Related to Printing
Most agency Owners are looking for ways to cut costs. One of the easiest ways to cut printing costs (are you ready for this one?), stop printing!! As you probably know, ink and paper aren’t cheap and we have a huge theme in our country about saving trees and being more "green".
So what are some realistic ways, in our industry, to save money? While stopping printing documents all together is probably not the answer, there are some great solutions to consider. Before you print something to pager, ask yourself, "Do I really need to print this or am I just doing this out of habit?" Certainly there are times when you do need to print but we are creatures of habit.
Like so many things in our industry, sometimes we need to just stop and think about why we do things and are their better alternatives!
If Printing, Print Only The Part You Need
Printing Web pages, for example, can be a problem; it wastes a lot of ink and paper and you can end up printing ads and banners that you don’t want or need. There are FREE programs (you will learn that we like to teach about "free" stuff), that can help. This will allow you to select just the portion of the page you want to print. For help with this, use HP Web Printing.
Free PDF Printing Programs
If you’re printing things to share with others or to file for later, consider printing to a PDF which can be viewed on any computer or emailed to someone. Any document should retain its formatting when converted to a PDF. Let's say you get bulletins from a carrier that you want to keep; possibly you are in the habit of printing these to paper. Why not set up an electronic folder on your desktop (or better yet in your agency Intranet), and print to a PDF and save it there. There are many free PDF writers and once loaded, they operate as a printer would; instead of selecting your HP Laser (for example) you choose this PDF writer. Try doPDF or PDFCreator.