Audit your organization’s printers to determine how much is being spent to print documents

By Richard Griffin

Toner Yields

MFP and printer manufacturers express cartridge yields at a standard amount of coverage—5 percent per color is normal, although I've seen some use 4 percent or 6 percent coverage. That works out to 5 percent for a typical black print, with 20 percent being the measure for color, as each of the four color cartridges yields their 5 percent.

This practice makes sense; the more image you have to print, the more toner it takes to print it. However, it makes it tough to calculate your costs because you must know, or at least be able to closely estimate, the coverage of the documents your organization prints to estimate what you're paying for printing.

In my case, I was lucky: our devices make coverage amounts available once prints are made, and that information is available on our JetAdmin software. We had over 13.1 million black prints logged to come up with an average coverage amount of 4.77 percent. Color devices are much more recent to my college, and due to the tightened economy and the higher cost of color we had only about 315,000 color prints to calculate our coverage, which came out 14.00 percent. Despite the smaller sampling, however, we are confident that number is representative of color documents our customers print.

The bottom line is that if you have access to the coverage numbers of documents produced by your organization, use them. However, if you don't, it should be O.K. to use the 5 percent per color standard. In our experience, the resulting costs should then err on the conservative side.

As you hang up the phone, you're engrossed in thought. This offer from a potential vendor, like similar ones before it, was tempting: they'd like to audit all the printers and MFPs in your organization to give you the picture of what you're really spending for printing. Of course, they'll do all this work for free, and of course, they'll make recommendations that will save your organization some serious cash.

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