The 12 Hidden Costs
of Office Printing

1. The time IT spends managing printers

Let’s start with the one that tends to get overlooked most easily: people.

Printers are often considered an IT responsibility, which means printer problems frequently end up on the IT helpdesk. Drivers need updating, devices disappear from the network, print queues stop working and users inevitably need help when something doesn’t behave as expected.

Each incident might only take ten or fifteen minutes to resolve. But add those incidents together across dozens or hundreds of devices and an entire year, and you’re paying skilled IT professionals to spend their time managing printers rather than working on cybersecurity, Microsoft 365, infrastructure or other strategic priorities.

The cost isn’t the printer – it’s the cost of the person fixing it.

2. The time employees spend waiting for print

IT isn’t the only department losing time. Employees can lose time walking to printers, waiting for large print jobs, searching for a working device or trying to resolve problems themselves before eventually giving up and calling someone.

It might seem trivial, but small delays repeated across an organisation become surprisingly expensive. If 200 employees each lose just five minutes a week dealing with printing, that’s around 867 hours of employee time over the course of a year.

Nobody puts “867 hours of lost productivity” on the printer budget (but they probably should).

3. Underused printers

More printers don’t necessarily mean a better print environment.

It’s common for organisations to accumulate devices over time as departments change, offices move and working patterns evolve. A printer that made perfect sense five years ago might now sit largely unused because fewer people work in that location.

The device still costs money, however. It needs servicing, consumables, electricity and eventually replacement.

A fleet review can often identify devices that are doing very little work and determine whether they could be removed, consolidated or replaced with something more appropriate.

The cheapest printer to run is sometimes the one you don’t need.

4. Overworked printers

The opposite problem can be just as costly.

Some devices end up handling far more work than they were designed for because other printers have been removed, offices have changed or demand has shifted between departments.

That can lead to more frequent breakdowns, higher maintenance requirements and shorter device lifespans.

A fleet can therefore be inefficient at both ends of the spectrum: too many devices doing too little, while others are being pushed too hard.

The answer isn’t necessarily more printers. It’s a better understanding of how the existing fleet is actually being used.

5. Consumable management

Toner and other consumables can create more costs than simply the price of the cartridge.

If supplies aren’t monitored properly, organisations can end up ordering toner too early and tying up money in stock, or discovering that a busy device is about to run out and having to arrange an urgent delivery. With a large fleet, managing different cartridges, drums and other consumables across multiple device models can also create a surprising amount of administration.

There is also the problem of obsolete stock. When devices are replaced or contracts change, unused consumables can be left sitting in cupboards with little prospect of being used.

Automated monitoring and proactive consumables management can remove much of this unnecessary work. Supplies can be ordered based on actual usage and delivered when they are needed, while stock levels and consumption can be monitored across the wider fleet.

The hidden cost isn’t just the toner. It’s the money tied up in stock, the time spent managing it and the disruption when the right consumable isn’t available when it’s needed.

6. Printing that never needed to happen

This one is harder to spot because the expense is spread across hundreds or thousands of individual print jobs. Someone prints a document “just in case”. Another person prints an email because it’s easier to read on paper. A report gets printed, read once and forgotten. Someone prints 30 pages when they only needed two.

The cost of each job is tiny but the cumulative cost isn’t. Paper, toner, electricity, device wear and the employee’s time all contribute to the true cost of that print. Print analytics and sensible print policies can help organisations understand where unnecessary printing is happening and, more importantly, why. The objective shouldn’t be to ban printing, it should be to stop paying for printing that serves no real purpose.

7. Colour printing

Colour is useful for certain applications. But it’s also considerably more expensive than monochrome printing, particularly when employees have unrestricted access to colour devices. A presentation printed in colour might make perfect sense. So might a marketing document or customer-facing proposal. But does an internal email really need to be printed in full colour?

Without visibility and appropriate controls, organisations can end up paying premium rates for print jobs that don’t actually benefit from colour. Even small changes in how colour printing is managed can make a meaningful difference across a large fleet.

8. Energy consumption

Printers consume electricity throughout their working lives, both when producing documents and when sitting in standby or sleep modes. Multiply that across a large fleet and the energy cost becomes another piece of the overall picture. Older devices can also be less efficient than newer models, particularly when an organisation has accumulated a mixed fleet over many years.

Energy consumption may not be the biggest line on the print budget, but it is still a cost worth understanding, particularly for organisations with sustainability targets or commitments to reducing energy use. And, of course, electricity isn’t the only environmental cost associated with printing.

Paper, consumables, transportation and device manufacturing all contribute to the wider footprint of the print environment.

9. Printer repairs and downtime

A printer that breaks down isn’t just a maintenance expense, it’s also a productivity problem. Employees still need to print, so they may have to walk to another device, wait for a repair or abandon the job altogether. Meanwhile, the organisation may be paying for an engineer to attend site, replacement parts and potentially expedited repairs. Recurring faults are particularly revealing.

If the same device repeatedly needs attention, the question shouldn’t simply be “How quickly can we fix it?” It should be “Why are we still paying to keep this device running?”

Sometimes the most cost-effective repair is replacement.

10. Security incidents

This is where the cost of printing can become considerably more serious. Printed documents can contain confidential customer information, financial data, employee records, commercial information or intellectual property. If documents are left unattended at a printer, printed to the wrong device or disposed of incorrectly, the organisation could face a security or compliance issue.

There is also the wider security of the devices themselves. Network-connected printers need appropriate access controls, firmware updates, authentication and security configuration just like other connected devices. The cost of a security incident can be vastly greater than the cost of the print job that caused it.

That’s why print security should be considered as part of the wider IT security environment rather than as an afterthought.

11. Managing multiple suppliers

The printer itself might be supplied by one company. Toner might come from another. Repairs could be handled by the manufacturer. Consumables might be ordered by procurement. IT might manage the devices while facilities manages the physical locations. Suddenly, a relatively simple piece of technology has created a surprisingly complicated supply chain.

There is a cost associated with that fragmentation.

Someone has to manage the contracts, raise purchase orders, deal with invoices, chase suppliers and work out who is responsible when something goes wrong. Consolidating services through a managed approach can reduce that administrative burden and give the organisation a single view of its print environment.

12. The cost of not knowing what you’re spending

This is perhaps the biggest hidden cost of all. Many organisations know roughly how much they spend on printers, but don’t have a clear picture of the total cost of printing.

Hardware might sit in one budget. Toner in another. IT time somewhere else. Paper may be purchased centrally or by individual departments. Repairs are accounted for separately. Electricity disappears into the wider facilities budget.

Nobody necessarily has ownership of the complete picture. That makes it difficult to answer some fairly basic questions:

• Which devices are costing us the most?
• Which locations are most expensive?
• How much are we spending per page?
• Where are we printing unnecessarily?
• Are we getting the right value from our current fleet?

Without that information, organisations tend to manage print based on individual problems rather than the overall environment.

And that’s how inefficiencies become normal.

The real cost of printing is bigger than the printer

None of this means that printing is inherently expensive or that businesses should try to eliminate it. There are plenty of situations where printing remains essential. The problem is that organisations often measure the cost of print too narrowly. They look at the price of the device and the toner cartridge while overlooking the people, processes, energy, security and inefficiencies surrounding them.

That’s why reducing print costs isn’t simply a matter of negotiating a cheaper price per page. It’s about understanding the entire print environment and identifying where money, time and resources are being wasted.

At Xeretec, that’s where our assessment-based approach to Managed Print Services can help. We start by understanding what’s actually happening across your print environment: what you’re using, what you’re spending, where the inefficiencies are and what risks might be hiding in plain sight. Only then can you make informed decisions about what to change, because the printer on the desk might be cheap.

It’s everything around it that can get expensive.