Why Most Businesses Don’t Know What Their Printing Is Actually Costing Them – And What To Do About It
There’s a question we ask almost every business we meet for the first time.
Do you know what your printing costs you?
Not roughly or approximately but precisely – by department, by site and by job.
The answer, more often than not, is no.
And that is not a criticism; it’s a very common situation. Print is one of those operational costs that tends to sit in the background, quietly ticking away, without ever getting the scrutiny it deserves. It’s not glamorous, it doesn’t come up in board meetings, and unless something goes visibly wrong, like a machine breaks down or a big bill arrives, most businesses don’t look at it all.
The problem is that not looking at it doesn’t mean that nothing is happening – it usually means quite the opposite.
How Print Costs Get Out of Control
Most businesses don’t set out to have a complicated print setup; it tends to evolve over time.
Devices are added when needed, contracts automatically renew, a new office opens, and a new supplier comes in. Over time, what started as a simple arrangement becomes a tangle of agreements, with devices at different ages, varying service levels, and costs that become almost impossible to track with any accuracy.
When that happens, a few things tend to follow….
First, visibility disappears. Without centralised reporting, it becomes very difficult to understand what is being spent and where. Costs get absorbed into general overheads rather than allocated to the departments or jobs that generated them. The IT team ends up carrying expenses that belong elsewhere, and decisions get made on guesswork.
Then, inconsistency creeps in – when you have a mixed-age fleet of devices running at different speeds and print qualities, it can create further problems. For businesses where print quality matters, logistics, client-facing materials, and compliance documents, inconsistency isn’t just inconvenient; it can risk your reputation.
Lastly, downtime becomes a big problem. Older devices need parts that are harder to find. Engineers take longer to respond. And when a machine goes offline, the knock-on effect ripples through the team, with processes reorganised, productivity dropping, and the true cost of that downtime never quite making it onto any report.
The Questions Every Business Should Be Able to Answer
Before any conversation about improving a print setup, it helps to establish what good visibility actually looks like. Here are four questions every business should be able to answer confidently:-
How much is print costing us in total, across all sites and devices?
This sounds basic. But for businesses with multiple contracts, multiple suppliers, or a mix of owned and leased devices, getting to a single, accurate number is often harder than it should be.
How is that cost broken down by department or cost centre?
Knowing the total is one thing. Knowing which part of the business is generating which proportion of the spend is another. Without this, internal billing becomes guesswork, and that makes budgets unreliable.
What does our support contract actually cover – and how quickly do issues get resolved?
Many businesses discover the answer to this question only when something goes wrong. Understanding your service level agreements before a machine goes down is considerably more useful than finding out afterwards.
Are our devices performing consistently – and how would we know if they weren’t?
Print consistency matters more than people often realise. In warehousing, logistics, and client-facing environments, the ability to trust that every machine produces the same high-quality output is important. Without monitoring in place, inconsistency can go unnoticed for a long time.
If any of these questions are difficult to answer, then that is something worth paying attention to.
What a Managed Print Contract Actually Changes
The value of a well-structured managed print contract isn’t just about cost reduction, although that tends to follow. It’s about clarity.
One contract, covering all devices across all sites, with a single point of contact for support. Accurate, real-time reporting that shows exactly what’s being spent and where, service-level agreements that minimise downtime and specify how quickly issues will be resolved, and remote monitoring that catches problems before they become disruptions.
When those things are in place, print stops being a background noise and becomes something you can actually manage.
The results speak for themselves. Businesses we’ve worked with have achieved savings of 32% on overall print costs and 40% on lease costs, not by doing anything radical, but simply by getting proper visibility and putting the right structure in place.
Where to Start
If you’re reading this and recognising your own business in any of it, then the starting point is straightforward.
We offer any organisation a free print and workflow audit. An honest look at what you currently have, what it’s actually costing, and where the gaps are, offers a clear picture of where things stand and what could be better.
This conversation costs nothing. And in most cases, what it uncovers more than justifies having it.
Parallel is a print, document, and workflow solutions provider supporting businesses across the UK. We help organisations gain visibility into their print costs, improve the reliability of their devices, and design processes that support how they actually work.
If you’d like to understand what a print audit involves and whether it might be useful for your business, get in touch. We are always happy to have an honest conversation.